Masking and Power: Carnival and Popular Culture in the Caribbean

Masking and Power

Cultural Studies of the Americas Edited by George Yúdice, Jean Franco, and Juan Flores Volume 8

Masking and Power: Carnival and Popular Culture in the Caribbean Gerard Aching

Volume 7

Scenes from Postmodern Life Beatriz Sarlo

Volume 6

Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts Néstor García Canclini

Volume 5

Music in Cuba Alejo Carpentier

Volume 4

Infertilities: Exploring Fictions of Barren Bodies Robin Truth Goodman

Volume 3

Latin Americanism Román de la Campa

Volume 2

Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics José Esteban Muñoz

Volume 1

The Fence and the River: Culture and Politics at the U.S.–Mexico Border Claire F. Fox

Masking and Power Carnival and Popular Culture in the Caribbean

Gerard Aching

Cultural Studies of the Americas, Volume 8

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London

Copyright 2002 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota Quotations from Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, by Aimé Césaire, are from Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry, translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). Copyright 1983 The Regents of the University of California. Reprinted with permission of the University of California Press. Quotations in French from Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, by Aimé Césaire, are reprinted from the edition of this book published by Editions Présence Africaine in 1956. Reprinted with permission of Editions Présence Africaine. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Aching, Gerard. Masking and power : carnival and popular culture in the Caribbean / Gerard Aching. p. cm. — (Cultural Studies of the Americas ; v. 8) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8166-4017-3 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8166-4018-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Carnival—Caribbean Area. 2. Masquerades—Caribbean Area. 3. Popular culture—Caribbean Area. 4. Caribbean Area—Social conditions. I. Title. II. Series. GT4223.A2 A25 2002 394.25'09729—dc21 2002005312 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: Masking, Misrecognition, Mimicry

1

PART I

Undisguised Masking ONE

Dispossession, Nonpossession, and Self-Possession: Postindependence Masking in Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance

51

TWO

The New Visibilities: Middle-Class Cosmopolitanism in the Street PART II

Masking through Language THREE

Specularity and the Language of Corpulence: Estrella’s Body in Cabrera Infante’s Tres tristes tigres

101

FOUR

Turning a Blind Eye in the Name of the Law: Cultural Alienation in Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magnifique Notes

153

Works Cited Index

171

165

126

73

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgments

This project has been long in the making, and there are many people to thank. At the institutional level, I am grateful to the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, for the opportunity it gave me in 1993 to begin approaching my inquiries in an interdisciplinary fashion. Copies of Peter Minshall’s public speeches, “The Use of Traditional Figures in Carnival Art,” “Where Do We Go from Here?” and “Address,” provided by the Callaloo Company, were of great value. I would also like to thank the Spanish and Portuguese department at New York University for its collegial support of my research and writing at very crucial junctures in their development. Many thanks to Doug Armato and his assistant, Gretchen Asmussen, of the University of Minnesota Press for their fine professionalism. I am grateful to Ulrich Baer, Manthia Diawara, Olakunle George, Sylvia Molloy, Judylyn Ryan, and George Yúdice for their time, critical engagement, and ideas. For their advice and insightful questions, I would like to thank Sandra Dunn, Bruno Gaudenzi, Conrad James, Cecelia Lawless, Ardele Lister, Pierre Sassone, Todd Senzon, and Edward Sullivan. I am indebted to Jeffrey and Cheryl Aching, Gabriela Basterra, Clif and Vanessa Davenport, Françoise Hayet, Catherine Lenfestey, and Carmen Wesson for their long-standing interest and support. For his patient attention during the last leg of book preparation, I am especially grateful to Miguel Ángel Balsa. Finally, it is a pleasure to dedicate this book to my parents, William and Ann Aching, who, in very important and tangible ways, encouraged me to undertake and complete this project. vii

This page intentionally left blank

INTRODUCTION Masking, Misrecognition, Mimicry

He wanted everybody to see him. When they saw him, they had to be blind not to see. —aldrick from The Dragon Can’t Dance, by Earl Lovelace Creole is originally a kind of conspiracy that concealed itself by its public and open expression. —édouard glissant, Caribbean Discourse

The epigraphs with which I open this chapter have inspired me to think about this study in a particular way. The first one comes from Earl Lovelace’s classic novel about transformations in Trinidad and Tobago’s carnival and urban society less than a decade after the twin-island nation obtained its political independence from Britain in 1962. In this excerpt, Aldrick, the novel’s protagonist, expresses the desire to be seen in a more profound manner than the collective gaze that observes him as he performs and revels in the dragon-mask costume that he would fabricate almost single-handedly and introduce into the streets of the capital during the annual carnival festivities. What has intrigued me about Aldrick’s expression of this desire to be seen is the apparent contradiction in terms. Why would he want “everybody to see him” after he had gone to the trouble of creating and wearing his dragon mask? Furthermore, Aldrick is quick to claim that his mask and performance will be so convincing that when the public sets eyes on him, it would have “to be blind not to see.” In perceiving this distinction, the dragon-mask maker suggests that two modes of visual perception lie at odds: one 1

2 Introduction

that constitutes an ordinary and superficial act of seeing, which he considers a sort of mundane blindness, and a second mode, a type of recognition that is not forthcoming as onlookers fail or refuse to see him. Lovelace’s perspicacity in laying bare this distinction has led me to ask what it is that Aldrick’s observers could not or would not see. In this book, my response has been to examine relationships between observers and masked subjects in an effort to comprehend how masks and masking activities in the contemporary Caribbean mediate social relations both within and outside carnival. The second epigraph urged me to reflect on similar dynamics of covert disclosures, but this time through language. Édouard Glissant asserts that Creole emerged in a colonial context in which it had been possible to hide meanings through this language’s “public and open expression.” What causes this statement to sound enigmatic, if not self-contradictory, is the prevalence of an occidental, logocentric assumption that the purpose of nonpoetic language is to communicate transparent meanings for and among “rational” speaking subjects. Yet, in terms of the region’s history, the contradiction in Glissant’s statement is as it should be because the notion of Creole’s open conspiracy not only captures the contradictions that were imposed on native colonial subjects but also describes the conditions of their desire for liberation from an oppressive system. Given circumstances in which the public utterances of native speaking subjects were circumscribed by imperial laws and their attendant codes of conduct, these subjects were obliged to seek expression through opaque, surreptitious, and resourceful means. Therefore, “public and open expression” in such a controlled environment can be considered, somewhat like Aldrick’s desire to be seen beyond his dragon mask, a call to recognize the resiliency of subjects who plied their daily activities within and outside the rules of imperial law and order. Whether such a call for recognition is considered threatening to the ruling classes, as Aldrick would like his to be, or interpellating for native colonial subjects, as Glissant suggests in the idea that Creole had been “a kind of conspiracy,” it is clear that language in the context that Glissant describes can also be employed to mask social relations. These reflections on forms of masking that call attention to rather than hide their practitioners have influenced the way I approach carnival and popular culture in this book. The paradox itself represents the first of two primary masking strategies that inform my understanding

Introduction 3

of masking and power. In order to explicate this strategy, my principal concerns in this and subsequent chapters are to present a case for the critical evaluation of masking as tactical activities that go beyond romanticized notions of masks and masking practices as pre- or even antimodern expressions of folkloric innocence and festive abandon. My goal is also to illustrate the currency of these and related activities in areas outside the celebration of carnival such as the traditional use of hyperbole, circumlocution, and, in some instances, the deployment of a “standard” European language to mediate and camouflage social relations. In my references to popular culture, I draw on Glissant’s view that popular culture is one of survival that historically (in his inquiry, before the departmentalization of the French-speaking West Indies in 1946) ran parallel to the organization of the plantation (1997, 580). Even though I want to argue in my understanding of popular culture in the Caribbean that some traditional elements of resistance to official culture continue to survive in the twenty-first century, I also take into consideration, as Néstor García Canclini has asserted with respect to contemporary Latin America as a whole, how peasant and traditional cultures no longer constitute most of popular culture and how “the popular” is no longer the monopoly of the popular sectors (1995, 155–56). It is precisely because of the growing privatization of popular cultural forms and practices that it has become crucial to transcend the romanticized view of masks and masking. To the extent that this view is still held to be certain, it encourages and perpetuates particular socially significant invisibilities under the sign of collective revelry. I am not merely referring to the persistent kinds of invisibility such as those that had been cast on native colonial subjects at the height of European imperialisms in the region, but especially to the sophisticated ways in which certain native subjects are still rendered invisible today in islands that have assumed various modes of political autonomy. Furthermore, such an anachronistic account of and approach to masks and masking practices is a difficult intellectual position to defend in light of the fact that Caribbean carnivals and other such popular festivals are not simply modern phenomena with certain “traditional vestiges,” but have turned into highly contested, representational sites of national and regional cultural identities. Contemporary Caribbean carnivals and popular festivals are promoted abroad, thrust into visibility in foreign markets, in order to attract tourist dollars. However, they also constitute sites and events where local

4 Introduction

governments carry out the duplicitous role of facilitating “national culture” for foreign consumption on the one hand, and scrutinizing, controlling, and policing public spaces where manifestations of that culture are exhibited on the other. This duplicity is particularly evident in islands where carnival is considered the principal national festival. This scenario is a twentieth-century phenomenon since it can be traced to those periods just after the acquisition of various types of political autonomy in the islands. But it has historical roots in the region’s oldest carnivals—which began over two hundred years ago in Cuba, Saint Domingue, Trinidad, and other colonies—when authorities found themselves in the delicate position of having to secure public order in and around festivities that were theoretically sanctioned by the Catholic Church and liturgical calendar. Thus, amidst the annual revelry in which different classes and sectors of Caribbean societies simultaneously took to the streets, the festivities also became events through which colonial authorities exercised, measured, and reaffirmed their power employing exhibited techniques of crowd control. As a visible means of challenging those authorities, many forms of masking and mimicry that took place during carnival celebrations became highly charged and complex modes of subversive communication through satire, parody, caricature, and witticisms in costuming, song, and dance. In other words, styles and modes of public visibility during carnival have historically described and embodied fundamental aspects of both the organization and contestation of social hierarchies. Hence, it is not surprising that these styles and modes also provide important information about social conduct in Caribbean societies during the rest of the year. “[V]isibility and invisibility,” as David Theo Goldberg succinctly claims in his study of the metaphors of (in)visibility in Frantz Fanon’s work, “. . . are the effects of strategic relations” (1996, 181). Therefore, beyond their typical reference to the action of donning a mask, I have employed the terms “masking” and “masking practices” to invoke a broader and deeper understanding of the antagonisms that produce situations of social (in)visibility. Slavoj Zˇiˇzek captures the kind of understanding to which I refer when he writes that the mask does not conceal the “truth” but embodies the “ideological distortion”; and it is for this reason, he argues, that it is important to avoid “simple metaphors of demasking, of throwing away the veils” that hide reality (1989, 28–29). In my readings, I have aimed to illustrate how masking practices negotiate

Introduction 5

degrees of recognition, misrecognition, and nonrecognition between masked subjects and viewing subjects. These issues concerning ways of (not) seeing and strategies of (in)visibility have in turn led me to explore the historical development and cultural contexts of particular visual regimes (structured ways of seeing) and visual politics (the enforcement or rejection of specific visual regimes) in the texts that I examine. Questions that emerged in the course of my readings included: Are there visual literacies that are practiced in similar ways by different island communities, despite the balkanization to which the region had been subjected by European imperialisms? If such similarities do exist, then to what extent can these visual regimes be considered homogeneous? The answers to these two questions can certainly provide evidence of supranational cultural practices in the Caribbean, which is to be expected in islands that were colonized in similarly systematic ways over a long period of time. However, since I am not inclined to celebrate these similarities for the sake of a utopian depiction of the region devoid of social critique, I do not wish to make these questions the most essential ones in this study. Now that the islands exercise their respective forms of self-government, I think it a far more urgent task to ascertain the status and position of cultural “insiders” by evaluating how they distinguish their visual practices and strategies of exclusion from those of other locals. Native competition to privilege certain visual regimes can be highly charged because seeing, as Lovelace illustrates, is not always about believing what one sees. For if it is at all possible to claim that rigidly bordered visual regimes exist, then these frontiers easily disintegrate when we ask very basic questions about viewing subjects, such as, who sees, who fails to see, and who refuses to see? Moreover, it is through this kind of mundane blindness that racist, classist, sexist, and homophobic practices cognitively emerge before a single word is uttered. Hence, in order to keep these issues of seeing, knowledge, and power at the forefront of my study, I want to argue that real, figurative, and rhetorical masks and masking devices maintain forms of (self)knowledge in abeyance. And because knowledge and ignorance do not exist in social isolation but in competing conditions, I would claim that ways of seeing and masking are fundamentally socioeconomic and ethical concerns. Given the nature of my arguments up to this point, it should come as no surprise that my critical approach in this study relies on certain

6 Introduction

psychoanalytical propositions. I am indebted to Robert Farris Thompson’s description of an important tenet in Yoruba philosophy of masking in which masking is considered “the ritual wearing of thresholds” (1988, 26). I have found it useful to reflect on conceptual aspects of masking that remained untouched by theorists, such as Thompson’s observation that in some African masking traditions—to which numerous Caribbean masking practices can be readily traced—masks and veils were not used to hide their bearers but to protect ordinary individuals from “the searing gaze of the king in a state of ritual unity with his forebears” (1984, 9).1 However, my debt is greater to Jacques Lacan’s theoretical work on vision, specularity, and subjectivity, and especially to his often cited notion of misrecognition (méconnaissance), a term that has been fruitful for theorizing ideology and one to which I will turn fuller attention in the following sections of this introduction. Suffice it to say, for the time being, that a psychoanalytical approach to masking practices not only informs how I describe specific contexts of masking in public but also permits me to elaborate an ideological position. My ideological goal in this study is to describe and prescribe forms of ideological demasking, to employ Zˇiˇzek’s coinage, in certain individual and official approaches to Caribbean carnival and popular cultural practices. This demasking, I would like to reiterate, is an engagement between subjects in uneven or hierarchical social positions. In the following section, I examine the anxieties that masking practices produced among particular nineteenth- and twentieth-century viewing subjects. I draw upon Mikhail Bakhtin’s historical/critical study of the carnivalesque in Rabelais and His World, as well as on some nineteenth-century accounts of carnival scenes in the Caribbean, in order to trace the expression and evolution of a historical anxiety by members of the ruling classes in the nineteenth century and the Creole middle class in the twentieth and twenty-first. In these accounts, demasking may be understood as an unexpected and undesirable ideological self-recognition (the shock of self-recognition) that is brought on by contact with a masked subject. As opposed to the term “unmasking,” which tends to be laden with the meaning that the mask is removed from someone else, I choose “demasking” in order to lay emphasis on the action of literally or figuratively removing an ideological mask from oneself or someone else in encounters and confrontations between masked subjects and viewing subjects. As such, “demasking” provides greater maneuverability for examining not just

Introduction 7

how the masked subject’s identity and/or consciousness is revealed, but also the ways in which the viewing subject comes to an awareness of his or her ideological position vis-à-vis the masked subject. Outside carnival, the ideological play between masking and demasking is manifested in similar contacts or confrontations with “masked” subjects who react against the ways in which they have been misrecognized through a collective gaze, as I subsequently illustrate in my reading of excerpts from Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal [Notebook of a return to the native land] and Frantz Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs [Black skin, white masks]. My ideological position in this study is a response to the second strategy that informs how I have thought about masking and power. When I say that I would like, through my readings, to demask both the state’s approaches to carnival and popular culture and those individuals who have investments in such approaches, I do so recruiting Zˇiˇzek’s important argument that cynicism and, in particular, the mask of cynical reason are the ruling class’s response to the “plebian rejection of the official culture by means of irony and sarcasm” (1989, 29). According to Zˇiˇzek, this class “recognizes” and “takes into account . . . the distance between the ideological mask and the reality, but it still finds reasons to retain the mask. This cynicism is not a direct position of immorality, it is more like morality itself put in the service of immorality” (29–30). In Haiti, History, and the Gods, Joan Dayan provides an illuminating example of how this mask of cynical reason functioned in statutes that attempted, in the final decades before the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution, to regulate the dress of all people of color for the sake of morality. She concludes that “[b]y regulating what could be worn, or what could be purchased, on moral or religious grounds, the mask of virtue disguised the necessity for racist segregation” (1995, 179–80). Demasking, in other words, means elucidating the ways in which particular demands for proper moral conduct are sometimes employed to cover up broader immoral practices. I carry out this critical task in chapters 2 and 4, where I focus most specifically on the consequences of certain constitutional practices. For my conceptualization of demasking, I am also indebted to Kwame Anthony Appiah’s definition of certain kinds of racism as “cognitive incapacity,” that is to say, as an “ideological defense” or “inability to change your mind in the face of evidence” (1992, 14–15). Even though the racism that most comes into focus in my study is the kind that is

8 Introduction

subtly played out within the islands, I find it useful to keep in mind Appiah’s wider definition of “cognitive incapacity” as the failure or refusal “to give up beliefs that play a part in justifying the special advantages we gain from our positions in the social order” (11). Although these “special advantages” are primarily socioeconomic, I would like this project to go beyond a simple denunciation of the Caribbean’s middle classes for being middle-class. In other words, the goal of attaining middle-class incomes in poverty-stricken regions is, from the perspective of the majority of the islands’ inhabitants, an accomplishment. Middle-class aspirations are inextricably woven into the fabric of most Caribbean societies. In his anthropological research in the 1970s on Providencia—a Colombian island with a mainly West Indian population—Peter J. Wilson argues in Crab Antics that Caribbean societies can be characterized by negotiated relationships between “respectability and reputation” (1973, 9).2 One of the reasons for renewed interest in Wilson’s work lies in the values that the anthropologist assigns to “respectability” and “reputation” and to the fact that he considers their relationship dialectical. For Peter van Koningsbruggen, reputation (and I believe the same is true for respectability) “is the complex of values that reflects correspondence between how people see themselves and how they want to be seen by others” (1997, 180). This statement captures some of the day-to-day, socioeconomic aspects of the visual politics that I would like to examine further. At their most ambitious, my interventions are intended to highlight the consequences of ignoring the obvious. I argue specifically that the middle class’s privatization of public spaces and popular cultural practices, as well as its concomitant “refinement” and iconization of both, diminish democratic access to visible sites and means of celebration and social critique. But given that there is overwhelming popular commitment to democracy in the Caribbean, my aim in this study has also been to imagine resistance and opposition to political leadership without measuring their efficacy in absolute terms of a successful or failed appropriation of political power. In my endeavors to explore the more mundane or less volatile world of cultural politics as usual, I recruit what Paul Gilroy has called politics “on a lower frequency,” a phrase that he employs to refer to traditions within the Black Atlantic in which the slaves’ expressions of their desire for liberation were played out under the

Introduction 9

noses of overseers in partly hidden public spaces (1993, 37). I examine this idea and its implications more closely later in this introduction. Although it is essential to explore such lower-frequency politics in order to appreciate the uses and perennially shifting limits of partly hidden public spaces—this is a subject that I investigate in chapter 1— it is, by the same token, necessary to examine what popular revolts might be said to accomplish in light of such politics. What, in a fuller sense, is being indicated when popular revolts and revolutions are considered “failed” attempts at appropriating political power? Popular revolts, it is often argued, fail because they are chaotic, carnivalesque, or improvised, and, subsequently, because they supposedly fall short of achieving the status of those famous, occidental narratives of revolution that emerged at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Nevertheless, the view that politics during crises can be carnivalesque has an eminent history. In “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Karl Marx introduces his subject by observing how new generations revolutionize themselves in periods of crisis by anxiously conjuring up “the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language” (1978, 595). Even more relevant for my study than the astonishing accuracy with which these words also capture annual carnival scenes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro, Port of Spain, and New Orleans—to name some of the largest of these festivals in the Americas—is Marx’s description of proletarian revolutions. According to Marx, these revolutions of the nineteenth century criticise themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again more gigantic before them, recoil ever and anon from the indefinite prodigiousness of their own aims, until the situation has been created which makes all turning back impossible. (597–98)

The reiterative character of these revolts and revolutions might appear chaotic and is frequently historicized by their adversaries as such, but this energy, as Marx illustrates, is an integral part of a process of historical

10 Introduction

development that culminates in and is transcended at what he conceptualizes as a point of no return. Similarly, Zˇiˇzek observes that no revolutionary process succeeds without its share of failed or premature moments and that these tend to be misrecognized by “the people” (1989, 59– 60). I do not pretend to know what this point of no return might look like for the dispossessed peoples of the Caribbean in an age of rampant economic neoliberalism that goes by the name of globalization. But I would like to focus my attention on forms and functions of mimicry as they appear in particular masking traditions and practices in Caribbean carnivals and oral popular culture, not only because some of these practices are reminiscent of what Marx saw as the ebb and flow of a proletarian revolutionary consciousness. In light of the spread of economic neoliberalism in developing nations and its related strategies of (in)visibility, these traditions and practices have been recruited to promote the visibilities of privileged subjects on the national stage, a subject to which I turn my attention in chapter 2. In what immediately follows, I establish a theoretical groundwork for evaluating how masking and mimicry in specific instances constitute effective lower-frequency politics. (De)Masking and Misrecognition The nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of legislative attempts to inhibit and later to facilitate Caribbean carnivals is so well documented in public ordinances that there is little mystery concerning the identities of those who participated in the festivities in the region’s colonial societies. The cultural historian Peter Burke has noted that New World carnivals, viewed from above, typically go through a four-stage process of development that he terms “participation, reform, withdrawal, and rediscovery” (1997, 159). This model of carnival’s development is certainly applicable to the Caribbean, but it is mostly the ruling classes’ hostile attitudes toward the event at the beginning of this process that have been historicized. According to Michael Anthony’s Parade of Carnivals in Trinidad, 1839–1989, a compilation of public ordinances, newspaper articles, and excerpts from travel writings on carnival after emancipation in Trinidad (1838), and to Nancy Pérez Rodríguez’s El carnaval santiaguero, a similar, two-volume collection of texts on Santiago de Cuba’s carnival, both the British and Spanish colonial governments annually prohibited or limited the use of masks and particular costumes during

Introduction 11

public festivities. The fear that masquerading accompanied by unruly behavior might escalate into tense and uncontrollable situations was not unfounded in these colonial contexts. Nevertheless, it also became evident to these officials that the complete prohibition of carnival activities, or even threats to do so, dangerously risked popular discontent. In Trinidad, efforts to curb and outlaw the festivities produced rising tensions between 1875 and 1881 until bloody confrontations finally broke out between revelers and armed authorities in the Canboulay Riots of the 1880s (Anthony 1989, 9–12).3 After much destruction, the situation was eventually resolved in favor of the revelers when the governor had appeased them by ordering the armed authorities to confine themselves to local barracks. Except during the twentieth century’s world wars, the British colonial government never moved to ban carnival again.4 Because of these and other confrontations between authorities and masqueraders, it can be said that there was a clear picture of the cultural frontiers, battle lines, and thresholds in the early history of Caribbean carnivals. Hence, the origins of the notion that the mask and masking inherently conceal unknown subjects and social agencies must be sought elsewhere. Even though historical documents point toward a public awareness of the group identities of those who masqueraded, the fear and suspiciousness that dominant social classes attributed to masks and masking traditions in popular festivals are well recorded in metropolitan European literatures. Clearly, this anxiety is also comprehensible within the broader context of colonial societies in which dominant classes worked to impose and uphold metropolitan cultural values and superiority in almost all privileged realms of social life. In this sense, the European history of critical views of the mask, laughter, the grotesque, and the carnivalesque that Mikhail Bakhtin so assiduously studies in Rabelais and His World is relevant to my study to the extent that that history also provides information about official stances vis-à-vis these practices in Caribbean carnivals and popular festivals. In her study of the uses of carnival and the grotesque in the contemporary Caribbean novel, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert provides abundant and insightful examples of these phenomena in works by authors from the English, Spanish, and French-speaking Caribbean. Yet, in so faithfully employing Bakhtin’s notions of the carnivalesque and the grotesque as universally applicable literary tropes—without contextualizing how the public spectacles that

12 Introduction

these tropes attempt to capture through language divide Caribbean communities internally along class and other lines—Paravisini-Gebert ends up referring to undifferentiated entities such as the “people” or “the ever-changing body of the people” (1997, 221), a habit for which Bakhtin himself has been repeatedly criticized. Bakhtin’s study and, in particular, his celebratory appreciation of the popular sectors of medieval and Renaissance European societies over “official” culture have been taken to task for their apparently boundless faith in a simultaneously universal yet elusive populism. For instance, in calling for the cautious adoption of Bakhtinian models, Dominick LaCapra underscores the usefulness of a grotesque aesthetic for understanding the Russian intellectual’s view of civil liberties (1983, 299). However, LaCapra also warns that there is “an unthematized tension in Bakhtin between his seemingly naïve, egalitarian populism and the sentiment that extreme democratization, in its tendency to level all structures of authority, makes carnivalesque forms weak and trivial if not otiose” (306). LaCapra rightly implies that a radical populism that seeks to eradicate all power hierarchies ironically pursues its own depoliticization. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White also find Bakhtin’s “optimistic populism” problematic (1986, 9), and prefer instead to build on the Russian intellectual’s work by conceptualizing the grotesque as a class struggle that manifests itself as a psychoanalytic symptom linked to a visual politics of the “grotesque” (social) body (193). In essence, although Bakhtin’s optimistic populism has proved critically unwieldy, it is the category of the grotesque (either as the failure or refusal during different historical periods to be “appropriately” identified, classifiable, and thus aesthetically appreciated) that has been most fruitful for discussions about the tensions that mediate and differentiate between socalled high and low cultures within given societies. Through no fault of his own, the Russian intellectual posited the grotesque as troubled mediations between high and low cultures in ways that were subsequently recruited to construct analogies in which “high” became synonymous with the colonizer’s culture and “low” with that of the colonized. Nevertheless, Bakhtin’s study is still useful for elucidating certain aspects of carnival and popular culture even as “high” and “low” in various national manifestations of the postindependence Caribbean have come, for the most part, to provide evidence of local antagonisms and new and complex configurations of power.

Introduction 13

Bakhtin’s work on Rabelais is useful for my study in two interrelated areas. Although the first area is extratextual, it serves as an apologia of sorts for his optimistic populism. In his prologue to Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World, Michael Holquist suggests that we visualize grotesque realism as a meticulous attack on Soviet socialist realism of the 1930s (1984, xvii). Consequently, Bakhtin’s study can be seen as (and was considered) a defense or redemption of the so-called anonymous masses in the face of the regime’s oppressiveness at that time, and it was principally for this reason that his book was not published until 1965. Rhetorically, in other words, Bakhtin masked his critique of the Soviet attitude toward culture in the 1930s with what Holquist calls a “hymn to the common man” (xviii). It is thus reasonable to argue that what might be considered critically unwieldy—that is, Bakhtin’s overtly optimistic populism—constituted an enabling political response by an intellectual to an adverse and militarized cultural policy. From this perspective, Bakhtin’s grotesque realism is not simply an aesthetic category based on elusive and subversive exaggerations, but a politically inspired overdetermination that was meant to counter a hegemonic socialist realism. Overdeterminations of this kind not only permit us to comprehend how the demands of intellectual activism sometimes outstrip the call for and practice of “objective” literary criticism; they can also represent, as I intend to show in several parts of this study, counteroffensive strategies through which masked subjects attempt to reassert their social visibility. A second useful area of Rabelais and His World is its historicization of anxieties about masks and masking practices. Certainly, the mask for Bakhtin is “the most complex theme of folk culture” and the foundations from which “parodies, caricatures, grimaces, eccentric postures, and comic gestures” are derived (1984, 39–40). According to Bakhtin, Enlightenment intellectuals failed to appreciate the mask’s “merry negation of uniformity and similarity” because they privileged static categories of knowledge (39). Although he tempers his critique of these intellectuals by stating that they stressed the weaker rather than the stronger aspects of their period in their interpretations of Rabelais, he nonetheless blames their “abstract rationalism and antihistoricism: for their incomprehension and intellectual intolerance for the excessive, the perpetually becoming, and the grotesque” (118). The result, therefore, was the limited and formalized use of carnival themes, forms, and symbols to achieve lofty aesthetic goals (118–19). For Bakhtin, if the Renais-

14 Introduction

sance possessed the most sophisticated understanding of the mask, laughter, mockery, and the grotesque, then it is the Enlightenment that represents the lowest ebb of that comprehension, unless, and Bakhtin’s text allows such a reading, this apparent lack of comprehension is strategic, similar to the ways in which the mask of cynical reason gets deployed today. Bakhtin argues that even though Romanticism to a certain extent represents a reaction against the absolutist promotion of “objective” reason in the Enlightenment, and even though the Romantic mask still maintains some connection with popular carnivals, it is, paradoxically, the Romantic view that is mostly responsible for imputing a certain negativity to the mask. He asserts that the Romantic mask “hides something, keeps a secret, deceives” (40). No longer does it possess a regenerating power but acquires a fundamental negativity: “A terrible vacuum, a nothingness lurks behind it” (40). Bakhtin credits the Romanticists for having conceptualized and elaborated the notion of an “interior infinite” in their works, a discursive and artistic space that provided them with freedom from static completeness and dogmatism (44). Unfortunately, Bakhtin refrains from further theorizing this interior space in his discussion. It would have been fruitful for us had he explored the opposition that he establishes between the positivity of the interior infinite and the negativity of the “terrible vacuum” and “nothingness” that the Romanticists assigned to the space behind the mask. What finally emerges from these European assessments of the mask, according to Bakhtin, is a deep-seated anxiety. Ultimately, the suspiciousness that has been attributed to the mask by dominant social groups is double-edged. And it has been the fruitful labor of Stallybrass and White in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression to expose and highlight the various ways in which the bourgeois rejection of the grotesque—a tendency that became increasingly widespread during the Enlightenment—implied that what was “socially peripheral” was in fact “symbolically central” in the creation of the European bourgeoisie as a class (1986, 5). Stallybrass and White also argue that it is essential to discern two related conceptualizations of the grotesque. According to them, the practice of transforming the grotesque into a category of the abject is also “a fundamental mechanism of identity formations [that] produces the second, hybrid grotesque at the level of the political unconscious by the very struggle to exclude the first

Introduction 15

grotesque” (193). By positioning this exclusion as an integral part of the bourgeoisie’s identity formation, Stallybrass and White are able to interrogate the reciprocity and thus the centrality of exclusion-production and high-low dynamics in texts that range from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. It is also to their credit that, in following the logic of the centrality of exclusion to bourgeois identity formation, their study does not constitute an unreflexive indictment of the middle class. When they claim to have shown throughout their work that the bourgeoisie is “perpetually rediscovering the carnivalesque as a radical source of transcendence” (201), Stallybrass and White are fully aware that practices of exclusion are inextricably bound to that class’s (or any class’s) pursuit of a pure (utopian) identity. I want to foreground this point because, as it will become evident in some of the following chapters, Creole bourgeoisies play an increasingly significant role in the promotion of contemporary carnivals as public sites for the exhibition of class, racial, sexual, and national identities. In their introduction, Stallybrass and White pose an important question that they propose to answer in their book: “How is it,” they ask, referring to carnival, “that a festival ritual now virtually eliminated from most of the popular culture of Europe has gained such prominence as an epistemological category?” (6). Their approach to answering the question is to claim that “the idea of carnival as an analytic category can only be fruitful if it is displaced into the broader concept of symbolic inversion and transgression” (18). This is an appropriate response for the contexts that they choose to examine, one that permits them to avoid simplistic, folkloric, and archaeological approaches to modern European societies. At the same time, Stallybrass and White are right to be critical of the tendency to apply Bakhtin wholesale to colonial or neocolonial situations elsewhere (11–13). Burke argues that the “New World carnival is much more than a European import” and that it has been “transposed” or “translated” by local circumstances (1997, 151). Hence, it is crucial to reiterate that Bakhtin’s work on Rabelais’s literature is of limited application to Caribbean carnivals and manifestations of popular culture because it elucidates homogeneous class formations that differ substantially from the mostly multiethnic, transnational, and class-straddling populations that participate in carnivals and popular culture in the Caribbean today. According to William Rowe and Vivian Schelling, so homogeneous a cultural and symbolic space is less relevant for comprehending

16 Introduction

the formation of Caribbean and Latin American middle and popular classes (1991, 195). In this light, the examination of the uses of masks and masking as socially significant practices in the Caribbean must not only specify the contexts and styles of masking; such an inquiry should also go beyond simplistic binarisms by describing and interrogating the ways in which masks and masking devices are dynamically employed to (re)configure and (dis)place competing categories of (self)knowledge in extremely diverse settings. In order to begin such a task, I would like to argue that there is another history to be told about masking practices in the Caribbean—that of masked subjects whose performances constitute visual traditions that are still present in and relevant to the region’s cultures today. This visual history also dates from the nineteenth century and, in contradistinction to the conflation of merriment and secrecy in masking practices, this visual narrative provides—from the perspective of these masked subjects—an articulation and reaffirmation of identity based for the most part on seriousness and disclosure. Rather than simply claiming that a competing “unofficial” history also exists—an argument that in effect only facilitates an epistemological inversion, a change in perspective from high to low culture—I am interested in illustrating, in an approach that partly relies on Stallybrass and White, how this reaffirmation of subjectivity through masking strategies or devices produces instances of demasking in the colonial and contemporary Caribbean. However, unlike Stallybrass and White’s assertion that in its exclusionary practices the bourgeoisie produces a second grotesque at the level of the political unconscious, I want to explore the possibility that this disclosure of subjectivities through masking, because it gets described in different Caribbean locales and at different times during the nineteenth century and later, is not strictly confined to an area of unconscious behavior. In The Trinidad Carnival, Errol Hill cites an eyewitness account of an 1848 carnival scene that recalls slavery ten years after emancipation (in former British West Indian colonies). Charles Day, the author of the account, encounters and is fascinated by “a gang of almost naked primitives bedaubed with black varnish, pulling at a chain attached by padlock to one of their number who was occasionally knocked down and ‘treated with a mock bastinadoing’” (1972, 24). Hill subsequently discusses Day’s observations, stating that

Introduction 17

The black varnish applied to already dark skins might suggest a direct imitation of the make-up of white planters masquerading as the negue jadin [garden or yard negro]. On the other hand, a similar masquerade, called the “molasses negro,” was seen by Lafcadio Hearn in Martinique in 1888. This character wore “nothing but a loin cloth around his loins; his whole body and face being smeared with an atrocious mixture of soot and molasses. He is supposed to represent the original African ancestor.” Blacking the face is, of course, an ancient practice. . . . In the West Indian carnival, blacking the face and body with soot and molasses could have had different connotations. Molasses, a product of the sugar cane, whose cultivation might well have been hateful to the plantation slaves, could be yet another of the freedom symbols used in the masquerade. In Trinidad, the “jab-molassi” (French diable) or molasses devil, is still a prevalent and much despised character in the masquerade. (24)

Hill refers to two kinds of masking. The first is a tactical mimicry of another mimicry: the blackened black masquerader mimics members of the white French Creole elite who masquerade as their black gardeners and servants. Blackening already black skin facilitates a strategic “reappropriation” of blackness beyond which no further mimicry is feasible. The second kind of masking, however, is transcendent in an equally significant way. For Hill, further blackening the face and body constitutes a symbolic freedom not only because this act invokes an ancient, that is, preslavery past, but primarily because the material used—soot and molasses—publicly exposes and denounces the objectification of blacks in the agricultural and industrial production of sugar that dominant social classes normally ignored during the rest of the year. “Objectification,” as Richard Schmitt argues, is best understood not as a transformation of people into objects or a deprivation of their freedom (since it is impossible to accomplish these violent acts absolutely), but as a “carefully orchestrated and systematic refusal to acknowledge their presence in and contributions to colonial society.” Yet before drawing any conclusions about this kind of masking, I would also like to take another episode into account. One of the texts that Nancy Pérez Rodríguez compiles in her collection on Santiago de Cuba’s carnival is that of Walter Goodman, a visitor to Cuba in the 1860s who expresses surprise at a form of masking that closely resembles the one that Day encountered in Trinidad in 1848 and Hearn

18 Introduction

in Martinique in 1888. Surveying the carnival festivities from his balcony one evening, Goodman attempts to make sense of what he observes: Something extraordinary and difficult to understand emerges because of its singular anomaly: a negro who has painted himself . . . black, highlighting his face and arms with soot and ink. His thick lips are brought out using a scarlet tone, his eyebrows white, and the rags that he wears, dirty from the tenacious and continued presence of filth, are smeared with tar and cane juice. This piece of flesh and miserable humanity is worthy of attention, because he comes to prove to us that the despised negro is not, in the final analysis, as black as he is painted. If truth be known, perhaps this man has adopted this disguise to prove to the world that looks on that there exists another world and another population blacker still. (1988, 99; my translation)

Like Day’s observation and in keeping with Hill’s analysis, the scene in which a black man parades himself as an even blacker man is complex because it questions the very notion of masking as concealment. Goodman arrives at this clairvoyance by witnessing an instance and practice of masking, the purpose of which, in a citywide festival of costumes, music, dance, and song, is (from the perspective of the dominant social classes) to conceal or invert identities rather than disclose them. Certainly, the reveler’s clothes do not constitute a disguise; they are the daily garb of the sugar-plantation slave or worker. But his body, marked to deepen his blackness through what Goodman considers a puzzling exaggeration, disclaims its social irrelevance. In other words, this masking strives toward maximizing social visibility within a racist, nineteenth-century colonial context in which the black body was deemed economically lucrative yet simultaneously deprived of social agency. Also noteworthy in this description is the pun “that the despised negro is not . . . as black as he is painted” that Goodman employs to reconcile that blackness exists as both a visible and an “invisible” presence. This pun allows him to shift from a reflection on a masked individual to the acknowledgment of a broader context, of “another population blacker still.” In the final analysis, Goodman’s reveler demasks the travel writer’s social status and purview. In his analysis of the use of veils and masks in the twentieth century, Kenneth Ramchand argues that “[i]n any given situation there are veils shrouding the individual, giving him a sense of identity with others like himself and ensuring some degree of privacy. This includes things like racial identity, religion, social status, material possessions and educa-

Introduction 19

tional qualifications” (1988, 7). But how do we explain the fact that these European travel writers were so unanimously fascinated by this masking practice that they individually recorded their own reactions against the grain of what authorities and the dominant classes must have considered a grotesque and abject “intrusion” in public spaces? Because the sudden awareness that black slaves are indeed black is not a surprising revelation, the more unexpected demasking that takes place in these travel accounts is the author’s own experiences of an ideological self-recognition. “Sometimes,” Ramchand writes, “the veil exists more in the eyes of the beholder than anywhere else” (7).5 To put it in Stallybrass and White’s terms, these travelers envisage bodies that, because of their accentuated or hyperreal blackness, oblige these travelers to recognize, acknowledge, and record their particaption in and attitude toward social and intellectual acts of exclusion. With respect to these travel writers, this accentuated blackness disrupts the suppression of particular knowledge that Stallybrass and White call the “second, hybrid grotesque at the level of the political unconscious.” And it is in this sense that it becomes possible to claim that what Goodman perceives as an “anomaly” in the masked individual that he encounters constitutes a record of a performed, epistemological counteroffensive. There are two points that I would now like to state and elaborate with respect to this tradition of identity reaffirmation through masking across related colonial contexts. First, it is not coincidental that these travel writers should have encountered examples of this tradition in English, French, and Spanish imperial possessions at different moments over a lengthy period of time. For the most part, the social history of the Caribbean across imperial borders is that of plantation societies that produced mutually antagonistic yet interlocked master and slave social relations. Consequently, the visual regimes and politics that inform this masking practice are not phenomena that can be solely identified with any one imperial project. Moreover, these regimes and politics are also widespread in a variety of daily activities in which the adroit use of partly concealed public spaces and strategies in these colonial societies became, given their colonial power hierarchies and strict codes of conduct, a powerful means of self-assertion. For example, in his seminal History of the Voice, it is quite understandable that in critiquing the pejorative use of the term “dialect” to refer to languages spoken throughout the English-speaking Caribbean, Kamau Brathwaite offers the term

20 Introduction

“nation language” and defines it as “the submerged area of that dialect which is much more closely allied to the African aspect of experience in the Caribbean” (1984, 13). In proffering that “caricature speaks in dialect” (13), Brathwaite suggests that caricature, as an expression that is at once submerged and detectable, offers evidence of the historical survival and evolution of cultural life beyond the imposition and full reach of colonial law within different imperial projects in the Caribbean. Glissant reaches a similar conclusion with respect to Creole when he avers, as I highlighted in this chapter’s second epigraph, that “Creole is originally a kind of conspiracy that concealed itself by its public and open expression” (1992, 124–25). Other significant critics have also theorized the ways in which partly hidden spaces and identities are fully constitutive of an identifiably Caribbean expression. In speaking of the necessity of describing the “play of ‘difference’ within identity,” Stuart Hall argues that despite the fact that Africa was made an “unspoken, unspeakable ‘presence’” in Caribbean culture, “[i]t is ‘hiding’ behind every verbal inflection, every narrative twist of Caribbean cultural life” (1989, 73–75). Gilroy broadens the scope of analysis considerably in The Black Atlantic when he writes of his interest in “the special political problems that arise from the fatal junction of the concept of nationality with the concept of culture and the affinities and affiliations which link the blacks of the West to one of their adoptive, parental cultures: the intellectual heritage of the West since the Enlightenment” (1993, 2). He calls the conceptual framework that he employs in order to interrogate these issues a “politics of transfiguration” that was “[c]reated under the very nose of the overseers” where it existed “on a lower frequency” (37). He warns, however, that this politics is not a counterdiscourse but a “counterculture that defiantly reconstructs its own critical, intellectual, and moral genealogy in a partially hidden public sphere of its own” (37–38). Clearly, there are sufficient critical analyses and consensus to claim that the reaffirmation of subjectivity through masking strategies has historically been based on the knowledge of and expertise in the multiple uses of submerged areas of colonial and, later, national culture and partially hidden public spheres. This claim explains a fundamental aspect of the historical relations between black subjectivities and cultural life in plantation America. While I do not propose to illustrate the extent to which this observation is applicable to all plantation America, I would argue that the cultural prac-

Introduction 21

tices that I describe in the following chapters are indeed partly or fully recognizable throughout the Caribbean. In this respect, my assertion somewhat resembles Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s notion of the Caribbean as a “meta-archipelago” that is composed of a series of features and practices that endlessly and fluidly repeat themselves (1992, 3–4 and 6). But I do not wish to align my understanding of these repetitions with a “discourse of Chaos, where every repetition is a practice that necessarily entails a difference and a step toward nothingness” (3). Instead, I propose that the repeated (in Marx’s sense of the push toward “mak[ing] all turning back impossible”) and partly hidden manifestations of Caribbean cultures be valorized as instances of lower-frequency politics that do not always aim to achieve social upheaval but seek to gain and maintain visible representation within the region’s democracies. This is not a conservative argument for permanently positioning masked subjectivities at the peripheries of social representation and agency. Rather, it is a corrective of the limited view that Caribbean masking practices and other manifestations of popular urban culture are merely symbolic sites of subversive activities and, by implication, failed attempts at transforming the social order. As I illustrate in chapter 1, the hypothesis that carnival masking practices should contest and forever transform the social order is unrealistic given the hegemony of the ruling classes in the Caribbean, the commitment to democracy on the part of the vast majority of the region’s inhabitants, and the importance of spontaneity and improvisation in public statements about racial, sexual, national, and cultural identities. Artistic and political expertise in the multiple uses of partly hidden public spaces is more complex a notion than the idea that carnivals are compulsively and ultimately subversive for the sake of being subversive. For the moment, suffice it to say that certain claims for visible representation operate on a lower political frequency and constitute some of the most preponderant masking practices across the Caribbean. The second point about identity reaffirmation through masking practices that I would like to emphasize is that the claim for visible social and political representation has not only continued to evolve in public spaces today but is also evident as an empowering rhetorical strategy in some of the region’s foundational literature. The claim to be a historical subject in the modern world has been stated in similar terms, for instance, in such seminal texts as Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land and in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. Césaire’s

22 Introduction

aesthetically and politically revolutionary poem is not merely a forceful indictment of colonialism; it is at the same time an act of psychosocial decolonization that is partially compromised both by the ways in which the histories of the colonizers and the colonized are inextricably bound and by the conscious participation of the native poet in this cultural regime. The partly autobiographical poem begins with a depressing and angry invocation of the “bush” [morne], of the Antilles, and of a town “sprawled-flat” by colonialism and poverty (1983, 35). But halfway through the text, the poet reaches the limits of his tolerance for what he has observed and declares stridently: “Put up with me. I won’t put up with you!” (57). This uncompromising self-declaration initiates a reversal in the text by which the poetic voice transcends the kinds of racist slurs frequently aimed at his black body (59)—“By a sudden and beneficent inner revolution, I now ignore my repugnant ugliness” (61)— and ushers in a complex dialectics of liberating insight and disquieting self-recognition. This “inner revolution” is promptly tested. Shortly before the famous coinage and definition of négritude in this poem (67), the poetic voice describes a scene in which the exaggerated physical appearance of a black streetcar passenger obliges him to experience his own fears and partial liberation: “You must know the extent of my cowardice. One evening on the streetcar facing me, a nigger” (63). At first, the description begins by denouncing the poverty that gave form to the passenger’s and, simultaneously, to the islands’ appearance: A nigger big as a pongo trying to make himself small on the streetcar bench. He was trying to leave behind, on this grimy bench, his gigantic legs and his trembling famished boxer hands. And everything had left him, was leaving him. His nose which looked like a drifting peninsula and even his negritude discolored as a result of untiring tawing. And the tawer was Poverty. A big unexpected lop-eared bat whose claw marks in his face had scabbed over into crusty islands. Or rather, it was a tireless worker, Poverty was, working on some hideous cartouche. One could easily see how that industrious and malevolent thumb had kneaded bumps into his brow, bored two bizarre parallel tunnels in his nose, overexaggerated his lips, and in a masterpiece of caricature, planed, polished and varnished the tiniest cutest little ear in all creation. (63)

At least two factors distinguish Césaire’s depiction of the passenger from the visual politics of Day’s, Hearn’s, and Goodman’s descriptions of the blackened, masked subjects. First, although the poet emphasizes poverty’s

Introduction 23

role in configuring the passenger’s “overexaggerated” physical features, the passenger is not a masquerader. In fact, because it takes place during normal, daily life in a modern urban center, the scene is not even extraordinary. However, the grotesque factor in this description is not so much the essentializing way in which a reified poverty designs the passenger’s black physiognomy; it is more clearly the conspicuous manner in which this large, impoverished black man somatically attempts to retreat from a collective gaze that objectifies him in this public space. Hence, this scene is dramatically juxtaposed—since it represents the other pole of a continuum of affirmative identity practices—to those occasions when Day’s, Hearn’s, and Goodman’s masked subjects publicly asserted and intentionally exaggerated their blackness during carnival’s brief period of social license. Second, whereas these men were European travel writers who observed from “safe” cultural and epistemological distances, the poetic voice is that of a native and cultural insider who, in finding himself on the same streetcar as his fellow black passenger, shares a modern existence and trajectory with him. Consequently, what he observes about his fellow black passenger distances him from those writers on the one hand, but positions him according to the forms of exclusion that he practices on the other.6 The poetic voice confesses his cowardice when he realizes the degree to which he uncritically participated in ridiculing and thus in distancing himself from his fellow traveler. And it is precisely laughter’s duplicity that allows the poetic voice to slip from his role in a humorous, collective gaze to an identification with the passenger based on a common ancestry: And the whole thing added up to a hideous nigger, a grouchy nigger, a melancholy nigger, a slouched nigger, his hands joined in prayer on a knobby stick. A nigger shrouded in an old threadbare coat. A comical and ugly nigger, with some women behind me sneering at him. He was comical and ugly, comical and ugly for sure. I displayed a big complicitous smile . . . My cowardice rediscovered! Hail to the three centuries which uphold my civil rights and my minimized blood! (63)

Just as Goodman is demasked (and then demasks himself in writing) in the face of blackened black subjects who reiterate their features in order

24 Introduction

to reaffirm their subjectivities, the poetic voice’s initial disdain for the passenger’s physical appearance leads to a process of self-recognition. Hence, the poet’s repeated reference to the passenger as “comical and ugly” is a grotesque mask that has been applied to the passenger through a collective gaze. When the poetic voice recognizes his own complicity and cowardice in this application, he blames his anxiety on a political and cultural regime that simultaneously guarantees his civil rights as a Frenchman and devalues his Afro-Caribbean ancestry. Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks is instructive because it provides a detailed personal account of what Césaire’s streetcar passenger might have undergone and thought—that is, the experience of being objectified as a black man, of being, as Fanon puts it, “sealed into that crushing objecthood” (1967, 109). Fanon’s text differs from Césaire’s in that it recalls events that took place in France in the 1950s and reveals how he attempts to liberate himself from a white European collective gaze.7 According to J. Michael Dash, another important feature that allows us to distinguish between the work of both Martinicans is that “[v]iolence is Fanon’s political application of the radical monism of Césaire’s thought” (1998, 69). In the chapter entitled “The Fact of Blackness,” Fanon states that blackness or négritude possesses two frames of reference: that of being black among one’s own and that of being black in the eyes of the white man (1967, 109–10). These frames of reference, however, are not separable because “not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man” (110). Such statements provide evidence of a common understanding about plantation America among dispersed black intellectuals. Fanon’s words, like Césaire’s on the difficulty of being both French and Afro-Caribbean, corroborate certain aspects of W. E. B. Du Bois’s theory of double-consciousness. Du Bois writes that the Negro is gifted with a “second sight” and defines “doubleconsciousness” as “a sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (1990, 8). It is important, as Judylyn Ryan illustrates in her study of Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, to distinguish concisely between these two modes of seeing.8 While Césaire’s poem reveals the moment when the poet discovered how and why he formerly participated in sneering at another black man, that is, the site at which he grapples with his own double-consciousness, Fanon’s text registers

Introduction 25

the ways in which he struggled deploying his own “second-sight” within French metropolitan society. According to Fanon, the black man is typically made to assume the burden of being responsible for his body, race, and ancestors (1967, 112). When he himself faces that burden he inquires rhetorically, “Where am I to be classified? Or, if you prefer, tucked away?” (113) and eventually concludes, “I was told to stay in my bounds, to go back where I belonged” (115). The point is that there is a verifiable historical continuity between the objectification, classification, and “concealment” of slaves during the heyday of the Caribbean’s sugar industry in the nineteenth century and Fanon’s experience of analogous epistemological pressures in twentieth-century French metropolitan culture. Fanon employs two strategies in order to counteract these pressures. The first strategy seems to “speak for” Césaire’s fellow passenger: “On that day, completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white man, who unmercifully imprisoned me, I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object” (112). Analogous to the slaves who reiterated their presence by painting themselves black, Fanon’s selfobjectification is neither pathological nor debilitating but reaffirmative. The second strategy promptly comes into play: he makes a scene. He publicly curses a woman who brazenly compliments “the negro” on his looks. In this manner, he is “set free” because he has “identified” his “enemies” (114). Fanon summarizes his rage and resolves it in the following manner: What! When it was I who had every reason to hate, to despise, I was rejected? When I should have been begged, implored, I was denied the slightest recognition? I resolved, since it was impossible for me to get away from an inborn complex, there remained only one solution: to make myself known. (115)

In his call for the recognition of his place in French society, Fanon quotes Césaire’s “Put up with me. I won’t put up with you!” (131). Although the masking practices that I described earlier took place in Caribbean carnivals during the nineteenth century, and Césaire and Fanon emblematized their respective forms of négritude in scenes that occurred in urban French and French Caribbean societies during the twentieth, these strategies are alike in that they claim public space for the presence of

26 Introduction

blacks both as part of a contemporary occidental reality and as a historical fact of modernity. It is worth recalling, as C. L. R. James in The Black Jacobins, Eric Williams in Capitalism and Slavery, and Manuel Moreno Fraginals in El ingenio have shown, that the sugar industry in the early and mid–nineteenth century represented some of Europe’s most advanced technologies and commercial enterprises at that time. Hence, what I would like to state about the similarities in and continuity of these traditions is that because their practitioners contest clearly dominant, colonial, and metropolitan regimes, they have employed counteroffensive exaggeration, overdetermination, and hyperreal performances to achieve shifts, whatever their degree of perceived tangibility, in local power configurations. I use these terms not to suggest redundance or superfluity but, from the perspective of subjects who have been obliged to make use of masking practices and partially hidden public spheres, given the adversities that they faced, to describe accessible and appropriate means of reaffirmation. The counteroffensive push for reaffirmation—to make oneself known, as Fanon might say—also functions in today’s climate of cultural criticism. But this action is not always understood as counteroffensive. In The Black Atlantic, for example, Gilroy attempts to find a critical middle ground between two mutually antagonistic views of modernity. On the one hand, he sets out to show the centrality of the Black Atlantic to occidental modernity. His evidence is historical: slavery has long been recognized as “internal to the structure of western civilisation” (1993, 9). This assertion is not new, but Gilroy wishes to emphasize that the struggle to “get black cultural expressions, analyses, and histories taken seriously in academic circles” continues (5–6). On the other hand, he also wants to address and critique problems of “ethnocentrism and nationalism” on the part of both blacks and whites (5). Gilroy later claims that an “overintegrated sense of cultural and ethnic particularity is very popular today, and blacks do not monopolise it” (31). Gilroy’s study is accomplished; yet this final statement is surprising considering the importance and sophistication of his work in this book. Understandably, Gilroy’s search for a critical middle ground makes it counterproductive for him to investigate why that “overintegrated sense” of particularity might be so “popular today.” Given his profound knowledge of politics “on a lower frequency,” as well as his proposition that a “resolutely utopian

Introduction 27

politics of transfiguration” gives rise throughout the Black Atlantic to “a counterculture that defiantly reconstructs its own critical, intellectual, and moral genealogy in a partially hidden public sphere of its own” (37– 38), Gilroy’s previous statement implies that tensions between blacks and whites surface because of simultaneously competing and equally powerful “overintegrated” senses of ethnocentrism. From the examples that I examined earlier, what should be clear by now is that colonial and neocolonial regimes maintain their hegemony not only through laws and their enforcement but also by what Appiah calls “cognitive incapacity.” Furthermore, their most powerful officials do not even have to be visible—much less overintegrated—in order to exercise power. Hence, those who bear the weight of (neo)colonial adversity require all the counteroffensive visibility that they can muster. On this particular theme, Gilroy’s critical middle ground begins to look like a moral high ground above the fray. At this point, I would like to bring these travel writing excerpts and critical arguments to bear more closely on the connections that I have been gradually drawing between “(de)masking” and “misrecognition.” Misrecognition (méconnaissance) has been one of the twentieth century’s most powerful theoretical concepts for the separate, as well as conflated, development of psychoanalytic and Marxist theories within literary and cultural studies. In 1949, Jacques Lacan furthered Freud’s work on the ego by coining the term méconnaissance and arguing that, instead of analyzing the ego according to the transparency of relations between perception and consciousness or under a scientifically wrought and prejudicial “reality principle,” it would be more fruitful to concentrate on the faulty and/or inadequate ways in which the subject identifies itself according to the bodily image that it sees of itself in a mirror (1994, 98–99). Of great interest for Marxist scholars and critics, like Louis Althusser and many other critics since Althusser’s seminal “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (first published in 1970), are Lacan’s suggestions that the mirror-phase “situates the instance of the ego, before its social determination” (1994, 94), and that this phase prior to social determination is “a drama whose internal impulse rushes from insufficiency to anticipation” (96). In short, the conceptual overlap between this “instance” before “social determination” and Marx’s and Marxist theorists’ work on man’s alienation in capitalist societies is patent. Althusser effectively

28 Introduction

forges this articulation in his famous thesis that “ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (1994, 123). I do not wish to gloss these ideas so hastily in search of the metaphorical and rhetorical uses of masks and veils in Lacan’s and Althusser’s texts, even though the exercise would be illuminating in essays that so vigorously negotiate and configure contingent relationships between sight and insight. Lacan, for example, calls the mirror-image the “threshold of the visible world” (1994, 95), and Althusser refers to his examples of ideological interpellation as “my little theoretical theatre” (1994, 131). Nor am I moving this discussion toward an essentialist ideology of blackness in and through assertive masking strategies. My aim, rather, is to illustrate how the nineteenth-century descriptions and twentieth-century elaborations of subjectivity through masking practices that I explore in this book can be considered provisos that attenuate universalizing definitions of subject formation. In proposing and illustrating “an ethics of the field of vision, and a psychoanalytic politics of visual representation,” Kaja Silverman’s The Threshold of the Visible World successfully inflects and elaborates some of Lacan’s statements (1996, 2). One of her approaches is to focus her analyses on those areas where Lacan either elides or falls short of incorporating the social in his theories of subjectivity.9 In her evaluation of Black Skin, White Masks, Silverman argues that Fanon’s text is a powerful reminder that the subject is not always voluntarily drawn to an image of itself in the way that Lacan postulated that the mirror-phase anticipates and produces an impulse toward an ideal “I” (1996, 27). Employing Lacan’s theories within the context of a specific visual regime, Silverman rightly argues that “the mirror which French society holds up to Fanon is radically deidealizing” (28). BenítezRojo also alludes to a similar notion in the “travestying mirror”—the distorted specularity that results after carnival has transformed the violence of plantation society (1997, 211). Fanon, in any case, is keenly aware of the insufficiency of abstractions such as Lacan’s when the former states that “[o]ntology—once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside—does not permit us to understand the being of the black man. For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man” (1967, 110). According to Ronald A. T. Judy, Fanon is not arguing in this observation that ontology should be abandoned. Fanon, he claims, is attempting to make ontology answer for his

Introduction 29

experience as a black man (1996, 60). Here lies the crux of an idea that permits me to establish a link between (de)masking and (mis)recognition. Given the specific historical contexts and fundamentally dialogical nature of the masking and identity affirmation practices that I have discussed, the most evident way in which the term “misrecognition” can be made theoretically productive for this study is to posit it as the invocation—to borrow Silverman’s terminology—of a “deidealizing” or deformative mirror that has been externally held up to unwilling subjects. This is not to say that Lacan’s ideas are not applicable to black subjectivities. But because so much psychic labor has historically gone into shunning and shattering the deformative mirrors of racism, it is crucial to illustrate how, at the same time that communities of black subjects envision and attend to their own development, they must also struggle against those mirrors and the hands that extend them. It is this simultaneous struggle that makes it necessary to distinguish, as Judy does, being black for the white—that is, “being black opposite (as in vis-à-vis), or in front of (as in the presence of) the white—from being black in-itself and for-itself ” (1996, 56). According to Paget Henry, even though Fanon owes much of this distinction between blackness in-itself and for-itself to Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism, the vocabulary is nonetheless germane to an Afro-Caribbean experience (2000, 82). For part of the profound rage that Fanon and Césaire express in their texts is directed not only at white hands but also at the ways in which deformative mirrors are and have been internalized as modes of double-consciousness that Du Bois calls the “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (1990, 8). This kind of double-consciousness and the confusion that it produces is undoubtedly at the center of Fanon’s analyses of interracial relationships in Black Skin, White Masks; the poetic voice in Césaire’s poem, by contrast, becomes aware of the duplicity within when he faces the impoverished black passenger and recognizes both his own cowardice and a shared ancestry. Misrecognition in these last examples refers to the degrees to which social antagonisms, such as the deformative mirrors of colonial racism, are internalized as negative modes of double-consciousness. In subsequent chapters, I will clarify how these debilitating internalizations and modes of double-consciousness are not the sole preserve of colonial regimes but continue to emerge tangibly in the contemporary Caribbean.

30 Introduction

If misrecognition, in the way that I have posited it, is the result of an externally imposed image, a deformative mirror against which the black subjects that I have described struggled, then exaggeration, overdetermination, and hyperreal strategies may be considered the means by which they sought to repel these forms of destructive specularity. Should these social antagonisms be internalized, their expulsion is contingent on a “sudden and beneficent inner revolution,” as Césaire puts it, brought about by the ability to recognize oneself in an act of exclusion. With respect to masking practices in this study, this shock of self-recognition, this demasking, most frequently comes into play upon the viewing subject’s confrontation with hyperreal blackness. Goodman, for example, observes a blackened, masked subject during Santiago de Cuba’s carnival and comes to realize—and it bears repeating—that “[t]his piece of flesh and miserable humanity is worthy of attention, because he comes to prove to us that the despised negro is not, in the final analysis, as black as he is painted. If truth be known, perhaps this man has adopted this disguise to prove to the world that looks on that there exists another world and another population blacker still” (Pérez Rodríguez 1988, 99). But who and what are demasked here? The scene, as I indicated the first time, illustrates how the masquerader’s appearance takes Goodman aback and that his “disguise” is nothing more than the public exhibition of a reality that is usually dismissed in colonial “public” spaces during the rest of the year. Goodman, however, articulates a basic colonial hypocrisy in which two kinds of blackness are prevalent: one that is applied to the masquerader in the form of a deformative mirror (the “despised negro” is painted and recognized as such), and another that negates the mirror (“the negro . . . is not as black as he is painted”). Through his observations, Goodman also provides himself with an opportunity to reflect on the distance that separates him on the balcony from the masked subject in the street below. Moreover, when he imagines the masked subject’s agency as that desire “to prove to the world that looks on that there exists another world” beyond his public sight, Goodman begins to comprehend and thus reveal his intellectual position in colonial configurations and acts of exclusion that the masked subject’s blackened blackness allows them both, in different ways, to transcend. This scenario is not merely a return to and about Stallybrass and White’s definition of that second or hybrid grotesque that becomes manifest because it is excluded from the process of iden-

Introduction 31

tity formation in the first place. Goodman inadvertently begins to demask colonial culture by naming and drawing attention to a specific “piece of flesh and miserable humanity”—that is to say, to an abject body that is not only and literally designated, as Judith Butler describes it, to “‘unlivable’ and ‘uninhabitable’ zones of social life” (1993, 3), but one that is itself represented as “unlivable” by the deformative mirror that gets held to it. Mimicry Thus far I have examined contexts of visual politics in which I show how techniques of ideological demasking are used to contest the deployment of deformative mirrors. Central to my analysis have been issues of competitive specularity through which affirmations of social positions and identity get manifested. Now, I would like to focus my attention on another related configuration of specularity and the use of mirrors that is crucial for understanding the creativity in performances that accompany Caribbean masking practices. I begin this final section by examining the specular objects and practices that Derek Walcott describes in his critique of V. S. Naipaul’s view of mimicry. Both the poet and the novelist represent two opposing views of the nature and utility of mimicry that often get repeated in debates about the importance and relevance of the region’s artistic and intellectual production. What lies at stake in this engagement, in short, is not only how subjectivities are posited and measured within forms of mimicry, but also, in a larger social framework, the evaluation of creative and political possibilities for the contemporary Caribbean after a long colonial history of enforced or prescribed specifications and codes about what actions and behaviors ought to be emulated. Derek Walcott’s “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry” is for the most part a response to Naipaul’s condemnation of the Caribbean, particularly in his novels The Middle Passage and The Mimic Men, as a place where nothing has been or ever will be created.10 Apart from its engagement with Naipaul on the issue of the region’s history, the essay is also an injunctive text and declaration of an ars poetica that posits, as Tejumola Olaniyan convincingly illustrates, a deeply romantic theory of tradition (1999, 203). Arguing for a definition of power beyond statecraft, Walcott’s essay carries out a rebuttal in three contiguous stages. First, it broadens Naipaul’s assertion by claiming that the novelist’s indictment

32 Introduction

should be leveled not only at the Caribbean but also at a common cultural history in the Americas. Walcott makes this assertion underscoring the centrality of blacks to the cultures of the Caribbean and to the American historical experience as a whole. Second, the poet subverts the novelist’s use of the word “nothing” and posits the revised meaning as a fundamental ingredient in the archipelago’s history and creativity. “In the Caribbean history is irrelevant,” Walcott writes, “not because it is not being created, or because it was sordid; but because it has never mattered. What has mattered is the loss of history, the amnesia of the traces, what has become necessary is imagination, imagination as necessity, as invention” (1993, 53). For the poet, carnival represents the best expression of this attitude toward (the loss of) history (54). Finally, Walcott argues for a conceptualization of mimicry as a transcendent “act of imagination” (54–55). Taking Walcott’s essay as a point of departure, I would like to argue that mimicry is more complex than mere imitation or mockery and to propose that the practice be seen and evaluated as a means of shifting power relations. As such, it may be considered a broad social practice with multiple points of intervention and without the requirement that the practice produce a complete break—as if that were possible—from its context in order to be effective. The suggestion that mimicry generates an empty or superfluous gesture that collapses back on itself in the final instance demands of it a violent irreversibility when, perhaps, the timing for a radical shift in power relations (such as Marx’s point of no return) may not be appropriate. In addition to its potential for radical change, mimicry should also be evaluated for the social significance of repeated gestures and activities. In other words, I want to look at mimicry as a form of politics “on a lower frequency” precisely because this is the kind of politics that comprehends those social agents and agencies that utilize or have utilized partially hidden public spaces in the Caribbean. This hypothesis is not an attempt to subsume the political within the cultural. Because oppositionality does not always demand or lead to social upheaval, it becomes necessary to explore mimicry as an activity or practice through which points of intervention are continuously being negotiated. This hypothesis lies at the center of my discussion in chapter 1. In any case, positing mimicry as such allows for an analysis of the cultural insider-outsider divide and of the simultaneous play of differences among diverse subjectivities and social agencies in contemporary Caribbean communities.

Introduction 33

Moreover, by not subscribing to the belief that mimicry fails unless it is politically transcendent, I mean to reiterate that Caribbean peoples have an investment in democratic self-rule, which means that they are also interested in exercising and safeguarding the widest possible range of official and unofficial access to (self)criticism. In this light, the notion of multiple points of intervention in Caribbean public spaces permits a theorization of mimicry as improvisational agency. To explore this last idea further, I first trace those aspects of Lacan’s observations about mimicry that Walcott and, in a related context, Homi K. Bhabha borrow, inflect, and develop when they describe and evaluate certain aspects of colonial and contemporary cultures. I then posit a way of understanding mimicry that both incorporates observations from the previous section of this chapter and interrogates the practice’s relationship to resistance or oppositionality in Caribbean carnivals and popular culture. Lacan’s statements about mimicry appear in “The Mirror-Phase as Formative of the Function of the I” (first published in 1949) and “Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a” (first published in 1964), two of his most cited texts on the relationship between subjectivity and visual perception. In the earlier essay, the reference to mimicry is brief. Lacan argues against conceptualizing mimicry according to “a supreme law of adaption” and proposes, following Roger Caillois’s observations of the activity in the natural world, that mimicry be associated with “the significance of space for the living organism” (Lacan 1994, 95). Mimicry, in this initial definition, functions rhetorically to bring Lacan closer to suggesting that the mirror-phase exemplifies the imago—that is, the organism’s attempt to establish a relationship with its reality (96). In the later work, Lacan continues to maintain that mimicry is not about adapting to a scenario (1981, 73) but about being “inscribed in the picture” (80). Referring once again to Caillois’s ideas, Lacan further emphasizes that mimicry is not passive but “deployed” as “travesty, camouflage, intimidation” (99): Mimicry reveals something in so far as it is distinct from what might be called an itself that is behind. The effect of mimicry is camouflage, in the strictly technical sense. It is not a question of harmonizing with the background but, against a mottled background, of being mottled—exactly like the technique of camouflage practised in human warfare. (99)11

Apart from insisting that mimicry is an active engagement, Lacan also suggests that travesty, camouflage, and intimidation pertain to a general

34 Introduction

proclivity that he calls the “over-valuation that the subject always tries to maintain in his appearance” (100). These observations tend toward articulating a universal subject, but they lead Lacan along that line to theorize about “over-valuation” and to proffer an idea that resonates in Althusser’s central thesis on ideology’s interpellation of subjects. In a paragraph on intimidation and over-valuation, Lacan writes: “Whenever we are dealing with imitation, we should be very careful not to think too quickly of the other who is being imitated. To imitate is no doubt to reproduce an image. But at bottom, it is, for the subject, to be inserted in a function whose exercise grasps it” (100; emphasis added). Because I want to look at the ways in which Bhabha and Walcott posit mimicry as constitutive of colonial and postcolonial ideologies, it would, for a moment, be worthwhile to highlight the resonance of Lacan’s statement in Althusser’s work. Arguing for a shift in analysis from the degree of accurate reproduction in the imitative act to the imitating subject’s activity, Lacan warns against too hastily paying attention to the imitated subject. This warning is consistent with his general inquiry into the distance and differences that the subject perceives between itself and its real and imagined (mirrored) images. Nevertheless, there are two agencies that seem to be at work in Lacan’s statement: on the one hand, “it is, for the subject, to be inserted” and, on the other, the imitating subject also conforms to “a function whose exercise grasps it.” Silverman claims that this statement illustrates the constraints that Lacan places on agency (1996, 204–5), but the formulation decisively structures a crucial reciprocity. This simultaneous reciprocity is also present in Althusser’s admittedly and purposefully “tautological proposition” (1994, 129) that “the category of the subject is constitutive of all ideology only insofar as all ideology has the function (which defines it) of ‘constituting’ concrete individuals as subjects” (129). Although the conditional “only insofar as” mediates and circumscribes a differential effect analogous to Lacan’s suggestion that there lies a greater distance between imitating and imitated subjects than usually thought, what is not carried over in the same way in Althusser’s “theoretical theatre” is the imitative act. However, imitation does not drop out of the picture entirely. For Althusser, it is tangible in the ways in which subjects reciprocate actions such as answering a summons, handshaking, and so on.

Introduction 35

The crux of Walcott’s engagement with Naipaul on mimicry may be invoked at this point as the Caribbean’s relationship to Western civilization and history and the ways in which the region can never (Naipaul) or does not (Walcott) measure up to that civilization and history. Disclaiming Naipaul’s indictment, Walcott implies that the novelist’s reading is superficial because although the surface of the archipelago’s historical and cultural current “may be littered with the despairs of broken systems and of failed experiments,” and although “the river, stilled, may reflect, mirror, mimic other images, . . . that is not its depth” (1993, 52– 53). Walcott then shifts from this initial reference to the shallowness of these specular activities to summarizing the novelist’s definition of mimicry: “To mimic, one needs a mirror, and, if I understand Mr. Naipaul correctly, our pantomime is conducted before a projection of ourselves which in its smallest gestures is based on metropolitan references. No gesture, according to this philosophy, is authentic, every sentence is a quotation, every movement either ambitious or pathetic, and because it is mimicry, uncreative” (53). In this summary, Walcott does not explain the relationship between the pantomime and its projection. Is the pantomime conducted before, against, or as a projection? Why is the projection “ours”? The mirror’s specularity in Walcott’s statement is not clear. According to the poet, the novelist leaves little or no room for a subjectivity that can distance itself from metropolitan references. Nevertheless, it must also be explained that the distance that Walcott seeks from metropolitan references is relative. Whereas the poet seeks to critique Naipaul for his Eurocentric view of the Caribbean, Walcott’s path to creativity is predicated not on the rejection of European traditions, Olaniyan notes, but on their mastery (1999, 201). Walcott associates Naipaul’s pessimism about politics and politicians— a sentiment that the poet comprehends but does not fully share—not with certain political cultures but with New World postcolonial cultures. Is this Naipaul’s rhetorical move alone? The poet seems to follow suit when he broadens his analysis to include all the Americas. While he defends this amplification on the basis of shared histories in this hemisphere, the poet discards a specificity whose loss resurfaces in an odd allusion that he makes to specularity. Retracing Naipaul’s thoughts on the subject, Walcott writes: “Once the meridian of European civilization has been crossed, according to the theory, we have entered a matter where

36 Introduction

there can only be simulations of self-discovery. The civilized virtues on the other side of the mirror are the virtues of social order, a lineally clear hierarchy, direction, purpose, balance” (1993, 53). But exactly what and where is “the other side of the mirror”? Is this configuration Naipaul’s inadvertent admission that European civilization holds up a deidealizing mirror to the Caribbean? The mirror here seems to stand as and for a cultural divide between hemispheres; it resembles the “meridian,” except that, unlike the mirror’s solid surface, the imaginary geographic line can be crossed. Whether or not it is Naipaul’s belief or Walcott’s reconstruction of it, this Manichaean division of cultural subjectivities does not facilitate the understanding that development and underdevelopment exist and are created on both sides of the meridian/mirror. Somewhere near the center of this debate, in other words, lies a contention about the distance that separates a positivistic notion of historical and social progress and the material signs of that progress. Walcott takes his stance on this issue by claiming that the region’s poverty is nonetheless a context within which the artist, like the mask maker in carnival, makes imaginative use of nothing—that is, of “waste, of ephemera, of built-in obsolescence” (55). Positing that Naipaul fails to see more than mere imitation in mimicry, Walcott attacks the idea that history’s great moments can be isolated. “[T]here is,” he writes, “no memory or history of the moment when man stopped imitating the ape, his ancestor, and became human. Therefore, everything is mere repetition” (53–54). With respect to the first European “discoverers” of the New World, Walcott asks: “What do they behold? They behold the images of themselves beholding. They are looking into the mirror of the sea, . . . or the mirror of the plain, the desert, or the sky” (54). This kind of specularity is more convincing than earlier examples. Refuting that the so-called problem of Caribbean/American peoples resided in their inability to find the “right” point of insertion into Western history and civilization—for, according to Walcott’s summary of Naipaul’s position, every gesture or movement is “either ambitious or pathetic”—Walcott insists that every writer is already “a mimic, a mirror man, he is the ape beholding himself ” (54) the moment that he or she puts down a word. Finally, Walcott continues his gloss of the natural world stating that “[m]imicry is an act of imagination, and, in some animals and insects, endemic cunning. Lizards, chameleons, most

Introduction 37

butterflies, and insects adapt the immediate subtleties of color and even of texture both as defense and as lure. Camouflage, whether it is in the grass-blade stripes of the tiger or the eyes of the leopard is mimicry, or more than that, it is design” (55). This sequence of images associated with mimicry repeats Lacan’s. In “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” (first published in 1987), Bhabha also makes use of Lacan’s statements on mimicry. Bhabha examines the discursive construction of a colonial mimicry that expresses “the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (1994, 86), culling most of his observations about this kind of mimicry from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial texts. Bhabha’s focus, it must be stressed, is on discourse and, specifically, on an ambivalence within colonial power that, on the one hand, exercises authority over and educates native peoples (hence, “the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other”) and, on the other, relegates them to an always socially inferior position (“almost the same, but not quite”), what Glissant calls “the insidious promise of being remade in the Other’s image, the illusion of successful mimesis” (1992, 15). For Bhabha, then, “mimicry emerges as the representation of a difference that is itself a disavowal” (1994, 86). He argues that this fundamental ambivalence lies at the heart of colonial discourse and attempts to elucidate it by recruiting Lacan’s statement, which he uses as an epigraph, that “[m]imicry reveals something in so far as it is distinct from what might be called an itself that is behind.” This recruitment, however, is only partly successful. Lacan’s exploration of mimicry emerges from a study on how the subject’s bodily ego is reflected, misrecognized, and then constituted. Mimicry for him centers on the subject’s ability to assert itself, to make room for itself in a particular context through camouflage, intimidation, and other forms of “over-valuation.” And it is this subject whose agency is dispersed between “something” and the “itself ” behind it. Bhabha’s essay examines the discourse of colonial power and locates mimicry’s “profound and disturbing” (86) ambivalence within it—that is, within that discourse’s simultaneous attempts to reform and disavow colonialism’s native subjects. This move is a bold one, for not only does Bhabha modify Lacan’s statement to interrogate a foundational ambivalence in the colonial discourse of power, but he also pathologizes that ambivalence

38 Introduction

in a way that the French psychoanalyst does not. Some of the pathologies include, first, the transformation of the “colonial subject” into a “partial presence” (“both ‘incomplete’ and ‘virtual’”) (86) and, second, the problem of a “double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority” (88); Bhabha also associates this double vision with “the partial representation/recognition of the colonial object” (88). These two points require clarification since they resemble ones that I used in the previous section. I have chosen to examine partial public spheres. When Bhabha speaks of “partial presence,” the term is analogous to what I have indicated as the knowledge and use of partial public spheres in the Caribbean. The fundamental difference, however, is that Bhabha equates this partiality with a “strategic limitation or prohibition within the authoritative discourse itself ” (86), and incompleteness and virtuality with colonial subjectivity. Besides implying that no agency exists outside colonial discourse, the claim permits him to surmise that “[t]he success of colonial appropriation depends on a proliferation of inappropriate objects that ensure its strategic failure, so that mimicry is at once resemblance and menace” (86). Similarly, Bhabha’s pathologized notion of “double vision” has little or nothing in common with Du Bois’s proposition that black people’s “second sight” represents the positive side of double-consciousness. At issue here is Bhabha’s theorization of mimicry as the colonial subject’s private pathology. Pathologizing the ambivalence at the heart of colonial discourse accomplishes two things—one intentional, the other inadvertent. The successful accomplishment is that Bhabha uncovers and interrogates a fundamental contradiction within imperial projects. Less satisfying about this pathologized ambivalence in colonial discourse, however, is the way in which—since it principally refers to the discourse’s internal ambivalence—it leaves little critical room for the colonial native’s agency. From this perspective, “almost the same, but not quite” remains imposed from above and is never a camouflage that might allow the native colonial subject, as Lacan puts it, “to be inserted into the picture” (1981, 99). What lies just below the surface in Bhabha’s essay—and this may be traced to the way in which he maps Lacan’s definition of the subject’s mimicry on to colonial discourse’s mismatched protagonists— is the colonial subject’s paranoia that what stands behind it may not be an itself but a native somebody else. What may also be at fault in Bhabha’s

Introduction 39

discussion of mimicry is the tendency to slip into statements about imitation, which, for Lacan, is not the same. The ease with which discussions about mimicry slip into observations about imitation (and vice versa) obviously implies that the terms overlap semantically. I would like to explore this overlap further because I believe that some clarification of it will be necessary for describing degrees of conscious agency in the carnival and popular practices that this book examines. “Mimicry” and “imitation” are loaded words in the discussion above, so I would like to put them aside momentarily and concentrate on a common denominator within them: repetition. In Caribbean Discourse, Glissant distinguishes precisely between an immature, mimetic impulse that he terms “the obsession with imitation” (1992, 18 and 46) and “the art of repetition,” which he considers “refreshingly inventive” (85). At the beginning of an anthropological study of Yoruba ritual that she places in dialogue with “poststructuralist theories of performance, social process, and literature,” Margaret Thompson Drewal interrogates some of her field’s basic assumptions about and methodological approaches to ritual (1992, xiv). By drawing Drewal’s work into this discussion, I am reiterating, on the one hand, that certain West African rituals continue in dynamic, hybridized forms in Caribbean carnivals and popular culture. This observation is by no means new in Caribbean studies, even in the cases of the most racially mixed islands. In a classic essay such as “El país de cuatro pisos” [The four-storied country], for example, José Luis González places Afro-Caribbean culture as the ground floor in his heuristic, Althusserian model for explaining Puerto Rico’s historical, cultural, and economic complexities (1989, 19–20). On the other hand, I am not proposing that African rituals and their continuities throughout the African diaspora in the Americas serve as practices so untouched by modernity that they provide the best examples of “pure” ritual. In fact, Drewal’s attention to the ways of defining repetition is illuminating because it focuses on fundamental microactivities that over time register cultural transformations. Drewal begins her first chapter stating that “[a] fundamental problem with the study of ritual has been our understanding of the nature of repetition, which has heretofore been seen as structurally restrictive or—at the very least—confining” (1992, 1). This understanding of repetition as structural confinement informs, for instance, Naipaul’s negative assess-

40 Introduction

ment of mimicry. Supporting her findings on field observations, as well as on critical work by both anthropologists and literary critics such as Linda Hutcheon and Henry Louis Gates Jr., Drewal posits the following: [P]henomenologically a thing repeated is never the same as its, or any other, “original.” In this sense, each repetition is in some way original, just as it is at the same time never totally novel. Or, as Clifford Geertz has put it, “it is the copying that originates.” This is because time does not repeat itself; rather, repetition operates within time to represent it, to mark it off, to measure it, to imbue it with a feeling of regularity and permanency, or even to substantiate its existence. (1–2)

She further clarifies her point by distinguishing two modes of repetition that are conceptually related. The first is a broad notion of repetition in which an entire event, like carnival, is periodically reproduced. The second is the kind that occurs continuously within a ritual performance and may facilitate a sense of stability (2). Focusing on this second mode, she points out that the apparent effect of uniformity provides tangible accessibility for participants in a ritual but that it also provides opportunities to generate “differentiation” (2). The second mode of repetition that Drewal describes allows for an anthropological analysis of cultural transformation based on opportunities available for partial transcendence or “differentiation.” Her argument—like Walcott’s that “mimicry is an act of imagination” but removed from his romanticized view—locates this partial transcendence in improvisation. For Drewal, improvisation is “transformational, often participatory and competitive” (7), features that include “choice-making” and that allow her to argue against ritual as “a process of regularization” that only reproduces the past or facilitates insignificant changes (11). Lacan’s ideas on mimicry are readily invoked here: Drewal’s theorization of repetition in ritual effectively details strategies by which the subject may be “inscribed in the picture.” Finally, the anthropologist explains that “play” is the basis upon which repetitions in ritual rest and may be transcended. “Play,” in the Yoruba sense, is a tactical and interactive exploration of situations (19). In the Caribbean and many parts of the Americas, it is mostly discernible in the call and response techniques that inform a wide variety of Afro-Caribbean religious rituals and performance and musical traditions. Drewal writes that in “play” [t]he object is to turn one condition into another through a series of exchanges that bring revelations, altered perceptions, or even a

Introduction 41

reorientation of the participants. It is the process itself that is critical, whereby each spontaneous response turns on the previous one and to some degree directs the one that follows. This process is also at times autotelic. When it involves competition between people, the activity itself organizes their relationships. (18; emphasis added)

I employ these connections that Drewal draws between repetition, improvisation, and play to explain certain carnival and popular cultural practices in the following chapters. However, before doing so I would like to close my discussion on mimicry by incorporating some of the points that I made in the previous section. The practices that I have called the “identity reaffirmation through masking practices” and the strategic uses of exaggeration, overdetermination, and the hyperreal exemplify various modes of mimicry according to Lacan’s notion of it as the means not of adapting to a context but of successfully inserting oneself in it. For him, over-valuation techniques such as camouflage, travesty, and intimidation alert viewers to the existence of an “itself that is behind.” In social contexts, I would add, the purpose of these moves is to produce a shift in power configurations. Hence, the ability to enter the picture, to be acknowledged in public spaces, to make oneself visible as Goodman’s masked subject had done are the measure by which mimicry ought to be evaluated. The ultimate goal of being inscribed in this public space is obviously not to position oneself entirely outside it but to transform power configurations within that space. In an essay first published in 1982, Michel Pêcheux argues that “reproduction” and “transformation” do not occur in separate or divided places (1994, 141–42) because what are really sought in the struggle to transform the relations of production are “new relationships of unevenness-subordination” (emphasis in original; 144). Positing mimicry as a social practice through which such new relationships become possible allows for the analyses of internal forces of resistance and opposition. These forces can but should not necessarily transcend their context in order to be effective. In Afro-Creole, for example, Richard D. E. Burton suggests that AfroCreole culture must entirely transcend its context in order to be successfully oppositional. This idea informs his view of Afro-Creole culture and also of carnival: In other words, I see cultural opposition in the Caribbean as doubleedged to the extent that an (Afro-)Creole culture cannot, by dint of its

42 Introduction

very creoleness, get entirely outside the dominant system in order to resist it (in de Certeau’s sense of the word) and so tends unconsciously to reproduce its underlying structures even as it consciously challenges its visible dominance. (1997, 8)

Burton partially equates (“to the extent that”) “(Afro-)Creole culture” and cultural opposition. Moreover, he posits “creoleness”—and not strategic practices within Creole cultures—as the phenomenon that facilitates opposition and yet holds it back. There are echoes here of Bhabha’s critique of ambivalence in colonial discourse, as well as a slight misreading of Glissant’s view that “what is most apparent in the dynamics of Creole is the continuous process of undermining its innate capacity for transcending its French origins” (1992, 20; emphasis added). Elaborating what he means by opposition, Burton writes that “an oppositional culture, precisely because it opposes the dominant order on the dominant order’s own ground, is always likely, sooner or later, to be ‘recuperated’ by it, as I believe the examples of Afro-Christianity, Rastafarianism, Voudou, carnival, and cricket, among others, demonstrate in the case of the Caribbean” (1997, 8). A more rigorous class analysis of the contexts that Burton describes would illustrate how class antagonisms also inform “creoleness” in ways that do not allow for an easily designated “outside”; as an “official” discourse about national culture in the contemporary Caribbean, “creoleness” is also an integral part of what Burton calls “the dominant system.” In this introduction, I have described some traditional Afro-Caribbean practices within carnivals and popular culture, not because Afro-Caribbean peoples were or are their only participants and/or practitioners, but because their communities were historically some of the first to make use of public spaces in the politically significant ways that I have described. In addition to providing examples of these practices, the chapters that follow complicate this traditional scenario by tracing and examining substantive changes within them, especially in light of the region’s acquisition of varied forms of political self-rule. I want to emphasize this issue of “autonomy” in order to clarify that the colonizer versus colonized polarity has shifted into broader, less visible, and more cosmopolitan configurations in which class differences and allegiances across borders inform and affect definitions of local and national cultures. What enhances this “invisibility” is the preponderance of the false impression

Introduction 43

that the former colonizers and new ones are physically absent and, hence, do not participate nor have a stake in local antagonisms. I have divided the four chapters that follow into two sections. The two chapters of the first section describe and examine the contexts of and transformations in the symbolic meanings of certain costumes and performances in Trinidad and Tobago’s carnival in the late 1970s and the late 1990s. In naming this first section “Undisguised Masking,” I want to underscore how traditional forms of masking have been abandoned in favor of alternative visibilities. Chapter 1 investigates the forms of social representation that are left to “invisible” urban communities when they no longer enjoy access to traditional ways of visible representation in public spaces. Earl Lovelace’s novel The Dragon Can’t Dance (1979) treats this subject in the context of carnival and its disappearing or radically transformed customs. The novel details and critiques some of the internal contradictions in the postindependence nation. It principally focuses on the costume and performance of the dragon mask and shows how it constitutes a visual trope that registers the status of particular communities on the national scene. Employing Daniel J. Crowley’s and Bruce Procope’s anthropological material on carnival masks in Trinidad, and Raoul Pantin’s coverage of the 1970 Black Power movement in the island, I illustrate how the dragon mask’s performance transcends its traditional practices of symbolic intervention in a moment of improvised revolt and is transformed into an open and undisguised political challenge. In this scenario, the abandonment of the costume/dance by the novel’s protagonist is an open-ended invitation and challenge to resolve the nation’s internal contradictions. Chapter 2 offers insight into more recent developments in carnival costumes and performances and describes the socioeconomic forces that have exacerbated the dilemmas that Lovelace’s novel brings into focus. This chapter begins by examining specific clauses in Trinidad and Tobago’s parliamentary Act No. 9 of 1991, which established the National Carnival Commission (NCC) in order to organize and promote carnival for local and foreign consumption. The commission’s use of the word “national” in its title ought to be interrogated because the new usage redefines the festival’s dynamic practices. The activities of the commission, as well as recent legislation on intellectual rights and properties, represent the latest attempts on the part of transnational businesses and the middle class to situate carnival and manifestations of popular culture

44 Introduction

as symbols of national unity. In the first part of my analysis, I interrogate how such legislative moves fuse the economic and the cultural through the middle-classization of carnival. The rest of the chapter details and elucidates some of the issues that are directly and indirectly related to this legislation, such as the kinds of cosmopolitan expertise that are currently expected of successful carnival costume designers and the Creole middle class’s mimicry and performance of what had formerly and exclusively been the “bad behavior” of particular marginalized groups. I have devoted the second section of this book, “Masking through Language,” to the deployment of masking practices through language in two literary texts. It is important to recognize that even though current film and video technologies have facilitated a wealth of visual research material, much of our information about masking and demasking spectacles have typically come from written sources, such as Bakhtin’s compendium in Rabelais and His World in the case of European literatures, Michael Anthony’s and Nancy Pérez Rodríguez’s compilations of legislation and journalism in the case of Caribbean carnivals, and the works of writers and artists in every literary and artistic tradition in the Caribbean. Carnivals and masking practices have frequently provided the region’s artists and writers with literary tropes that articulate their respective societies’ internal contradictions. I am referring not only to novels that depict or make use of carnival scenes specifically, like Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance or Wilson Harris’s The Carnival Trilogy (1985– 1990), but also to the neo-Baroque styles of José Lezama Lima, Severo Sarduy, Reinaldo Arenas, Luis Rafael Sánchez, and others. Furthermore, and as I will point out in the chapters that compose this section of the book, the texts that I have chosen to examine are not unusual in the degree to which they reveal that masking and demasking practices are ubiquitous, occasionally violent, everyday activities that undergird the very fabric of life in the Caribbean. In chapter 3, I analyze a particular attempt at imagining a cultural location for an Afro-Cuban figure in Havana’s prerevolutionary nightlife. The figure is that of Estrella, an obese bolero singer who appears in designated sections of Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s novel, Tres tristes tigres (first published in 1964–1967). When Códac, the native protagonist/narrator, first encounters the undiscovered singer, he employs a relentless stream of hyperbolic images in order to capture the allure of the singer’s corpulence. There are various terms in the island

Introduction 45

for this popular linguistic practice. In Cuba, it is known as choteo. Drawing from works by Freud, Lacan, Silverman, and especially Jorge Mañach, I interrogate choteo’s rhetorical masking devices and show how the practice reproduces a visual regime that celebrates the presence and cultural contributions of Afro-Cubans on the island. I subsequently examine how that regime is radically undermined through a different, opportunistic “look” that gives way to an unambiguous visual violence. One of the most important figures of popular wisdom and authority in the French West Indies is that of the conteur. In traditional societies where orality was the means by which a community’s history was narrated, commented, and critiqued, the conteur’s role in his nightly disquisitions and performances was that of historian, moral arbiter, and entertainer. The state’s inquiry into the strange death just after carnival of Solibo—the conteur in Patrick Chamoiseau’s novel Solibo Magnifique (1988)—by a sort of linguistic choking (égorgette de la parole) is the subject of the novel and the focus of my analysis in the final chapter. At the center of this mystery lies the local population’s inability to participate in a traditional form of constructive mimicry: the call and response activities that the conteur normally employs in order to unite the community. In islands that acquired their “autonomy” as French overseas departments by plebiscite, the use of the voice to enunciate and claim cultural autonomy is severely contested and compromised. Yet the presumed failure of the state’s officials to see and come to terms with the ways in which they have contributed to Solibo’s death is also a crucial theme in the novel. Their deployment of “standard” French as a means of conserving their masks of cynical reason lie at the heart of their function as the upholders of law and order. Employing the work of Césaire, Glissant, Chamoiseau, and others in order to interrogate the relationships that the novel establishes between voice and the refusal to see, I examine certain unresolved tensions between the state and popular culture as they are depicted in the inquiries into the conteur’s death. This study is meant to provide insight into local, national, and regional cultural practices in the Caribbean and, in a sense, follow the lead that Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s The Repeating Island and J. Michael Dash’s The Other America set in proposing that scholars should attempt a pan-Caribbean approach to the region’s literatures and cultures. The interdisciplinary investigative approach that I employ to examine forms

46 Introduction

of masking and demasking in this study finds its inspiration in BenítezRojo’s multifaceted analyses of figures such as the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre in The Repeating Island (1992, 12–16) and of the popular song and dance for killing a snake that Benítez-Rojo examines in a famous poem by Nicolás Guillén (1997, 204–7). Even though I believe that we have a great deal to learn from one another’s literary and cultural traditions in the Caribbean, I would like to stress the word “attempt,” for I am in agreement with Dash that because of the newness of systemic theorizing by critics in the region and because of the pervasiveness of nationalist criticism, “Caribbean thought does present certain difficulties to the best-intentioned researcher” (1998, 9). While I would like this study to contribute to the current disposition toward the development of pan-Caribbean perspectives and approaches, I hedge my critical aspirations on the usefulness of locating and researching common cultural practices such as those highlighted in the blackening of black skin by masked subjects in Cuba, Martinique, and Trinidad during the nineteenth century. In light of the accessibility of such common ground, I am also in full agreement with Silvio Torres-Saillant when he argues that “the proper stance for Caribbeanists is to shrug off the intellectual burden of proving the oneness of Caribbean literature and to affirm the working hypothesis that Caribbean literature exists in fact as an object of cognition” (1997, 57). The close readings of masking practices through costuming and language in what follows entail such processes of cognition. Moreover, I imagine that a Trinidadian would come to realize that the Cuban choteo that I describe in chapter 3 bears a striking resemblance to his or her practice of fatigue and picong; that the commodification of oppositional cultural practices that I illustrate in my analysis of The Dragon Can’t Dance is discernible in the preponderance of celebration over social criticism in popular cultural forms throughout the contemporary Caribbean; that the Martinican dilemmas of cultural identity, alienation, and political voice that I interrogate in chapter 4 have much in common with Puerto Rico’s; and, finally, that the contemporary regulation (and even legislation) of carnival and other forms of popular culture in democratic, politically independent islands of the Caribbean is similarly practiced in socialist Cuba’s current promotion of its music and carnival. It is in quest of this comparative insight—instead of one in which the cultural

Introduction 47

production of individual islands gets compared with metropolitan centers in Europe and North America—that I present the following chapters. Consequently, in order to respect the integrity of the islands’ respective critical traditions, I have also taken care, whenever possible and fruitful, to employ native criticism in conjunction with others in order to shed light on local dilemmas and debates.

This page intentionally left blank

Part I Undisguised Masking

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER ONE Dispossession, Nonpossession, and Self-Possession Postindependence Masking in Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance

We have to live as people, people. We have to rise. Rise up. But how do you rise up when your brothers are making peace for a few dollars? When sisters selling their souls, and mothers and fathers selling their children. How can you rise with rent to pay and children to school, and watch hunger march across your yard and camp inside your house? How can you not make peace? Aldrick said a phrase of which he would be very proud long afterwards: “I don’t know.” —aldrick from The Dragon Can’t Dance

At the culminating moment of an ardent impromptu speech that he gave before a crowd that had been following him and his fellow “warriors” in their revolt against disempowerment, the protagonist of Earl Lovelace’s novel The Dragon Can’t Dance utters a bewildering statement. The revolt ends with their arrest and eventual trial, all of which do not inhibit them from expressing their satisfaction because they were able to scare and intimidate the population into recognizing them and their demands for social justice. There is, however, an unresolved issue in Aldrick’s speech that still has not been studied adequately in the novel’s criticism: why, at this crucial moment, as he stands before a crowd of followers who listen to him rail against poverty and oppression, should he proffer a perplexing and anticlimatic “I don’t know”? Above all, what pride is there to be savored in such an apparently untimely admission? I propose to answer these questions in this chapter. For I believe that the failure to address Aldrick’s enigmatic response has led to misunderstand51

52 Dispossession, Nonpossession, Self-Possession

ings about the way in which social protest is manifested and “resolved” within and outside carnival. I want to show how the protagonist’s “I don’t know” is an impasse at which three overlapping practices rooted semantically in the word “possession” meet and shift relations to one another: they are dispossession, nonpossession, and self-possession. Combined, they constitute a discourse that is the inverse of the utopian cry “all o’ we is one” that is enunciated during the carnival celebrations in the novel but increasingly rings false as degrees of alienation in Aldrick’s community become manifest. I also want to explore the implications of Aldrick’s transcendence of that impasse. These three practices are never isolated in the text but play against one another as their configurations continuously shift. The dragon mask, or mas’, as it is locally known in Trinidad and Tobago, can be seen as a visual trope and material indicator of these changing configurations.1 Angelita Reyes goes so far as to say that this carnival, in which characters such as the dragon mask emerge, should be seen as the fullness of history itself (1986, 68). For Diana Brydon, the novel explicitly exposes the transition from resistance to accommodation in the annual event (1989, 320). Nevertheless, for the sake of clarity, it will be necessary to begin by describing these terms separately. The first scene that the reader encounters in the novel’s prologue is a landscape that a dispossessed population inhabits: This is the hill, Calvary Hill, where the sun set on starvation and rise on potholed roads, thrones for stray dogs that you could play banjo on their rib bones, holding garbage piled high like a cathedral spire, sparkling with flies buzzing like torpedoes; and if you want to pass from your yard to the road you have to be a high-jumper to jump over the gutter full up with dirty water, and hold your nose. Is noise whole day. Laughter is not laughter; it is a groan coming from the bosom of these houses—no— not houses, shacks that leap out of the red dirt and stone, thin like smoke, fragile like kite paper, balancing on their rickety pillars as broomsticks on the edge of a juggler’s nose. (1979, 9)

More than a landscape, this is a living tableau of forsaken poverty that literally mocks and disguises “underdevelopment” in its invocation of thrones, a cathedral spire, and pillars. It is dispossessed communities such as this one that the dragon mask proudly represents at carnival time when it takes to the streets of Port of Spain and briefly inscribes itself into the picture of a modernizing nation. In this chapter, I use the

Dispossession, Nonpossession, Self-Possession 53

term “dispossession” to refer to the postindependence political abandonment of poor urban constituencies such as this one. Rising out of this landscape is a spirit of rebellion against poverty. Paradoxically, it is not manifested as an outright rejection of disenfranchisement but as an ideology of nonpossession through which the Hill’s inhabitants transcend material impoverishment by holding to it as they would a prized possession. Aldrick and other characters assiduously cultivate their antimaterialism in this manner. According to the narrator, for example, the community’s elders survive on the Hill, holding their poverty as a possession, tending it stubbornly as Miss Cleothilda tends her flower garden, clasping it to their bosom as a passkey whose function they only half-remembered now, and, grown rusty, they wore as jewelry, a charm, a charmed medallion whose magic invested them with a mysterious purity, made them blue-bloods of a resistance lived by their ancestors all through slavery, carried on in their unceasing escape—as Maroons, as Runaways, as Bush Negroes, as Rebels . . . asserting their humanness in the most wonderful acts of sabotage they could imagine and perform, making a religion of laziness and neglect and stupidity and waste . . . refusing to be grist for the mill of the colonial machinery. (10)

Nonpossession, therefore, is a historical practice and ideology. The notion that Calvary Hill should give rise to a proud aristocracy of the poor asks the reader to fathom how this ideology generates a humanism that runs counter to the country’s particular postindependence initiatives to gain economic strength. Because nonpossession is rooted in a longstanding intransigence, it cannot be taken for granted, as Brydon implies, that the desire to transcend poverty is unanimous but limited by an “inherited habit of dualistic thinking” on the part of some of the Hill’s inhabitants (1989, 322). The novel is more complex than this reductionist and essentialist duality. For Ramchand, the novel “erodes the contrast between the practitioners of the philosophy of nonpossession and those who quietly engage in the accumulation of economic strength” (1988, 9). Burton correctly positions the novel’s characters along a continuum between reputation and respectability (1997, 213–18). In the midst of the political antagonisms between the official practice of dispossession and the countercultural ideology of nonpossession, there lies the third practice: Aldrick’s personal quest to become self-possessed, to forge an identity after the Hill begins to lose its cohesiveness and,

54 Dispossession, Nonpossession, Self-Possession

consequently, its inhabitants’ support for the dragon’s function and dance. Because the dragon’s mask and dance mediate these antagonisms, Aldrick’s subsequent urge to find himself cannot be separated from the sense of loss that he and others experience when he eventually decides not to bring out the dragon that year. The novel presents a situation in which a traditional mask is no longer able or willing to inscribe its presence in public arenas during carnival.2 Its former bearer, therefore, seeks other ways of reaffirming his social identity, especially in light of the Hill’s waning ideology of nonpossession. A Brief History of the Dragon Mask and Its Dances Bettelheim, Nunley, and Bridges explain that despite their diverse origins on the continent, Africans in the Americas understood masquerade to be a combination of “music, dance, costume, sculpture, and drama in a single performance” (1988, 35). Although this statement applies to the dragon mask and its dances, this understanding should also be considered a form of historical knowledge. In order to do so, it is necessary to acknowledge that the analysis of dance differs from that of discourse in its approach to conceptualizing and representing contradiction. For example, when Michel Foucault examines contradiction in discourse, he asserts that the former is “the illusion of a unity that hides itself or is hidden: it has its place only in the gap between consciousness and unconsciousness, thought and the text, the ideality and the contingent body of expression. In any case, analysis must suppress contradiction as best it can” (1971, 150; emphasis added). Drewal’s research on repetition and play in ritual shows that “differentiation” is intentionally invoked; it is the activity itself that is critical because it provides latitude for choice making and multiple points of intervention. Vévé Clark, by contrast, attempts to bridge discourse and dance by distinguishing between milieux de mémoire, or research on dance, and lieux de mémoire, the contexts of its performance. For Clark, there is greater proximity between history and memory in the African diaspora’s lieux de mémoire than in the way that the concept “presupposes emotional and intellectual distance from memory and history” in research, for instance, on the history of the French Revolution (1994, 188). Finally, and with respect to the mask itself, it is worth recalling Zˇiˇzek’s proposition that the mask does not conceal reality but marks its contradictions (1989, 28–29). In the analysis of the dragon costume that follows, I will first focus on research on

Dispossession, Nonpossession, Self-Possession 55

the mask and its dances before examining the contexts of their function both inside and outside carnival. Analogous to my analysis of the blackened, black subjects in the introduction, this chapter describes and investigates the serious and concerted use of a carnival mask for the purposes of demasking a national community of viewing subjects. In an article written for the Trinidad Carnival issue of the Caribbean Quarterly in 1956, Bruce Procope describes the origins of the dragon band, or devil band. Tracing its genealogy, he notes first that the band descended from the Jab-Jab (patois for the French diable-diable) or Devil Mas’.3 He then fixes the moment of the dragon band’s genesis with astonishing exactitude: “It had its beginnings in 1906 when Patrick Jones assisted by Gilbert Scamaroni, and prompted by a sacred picture illustrating the exorcism of the devil from a sick person, decided to organize a band. This sacred picture was seen by Patrick Jones at a shop situated at what is now No. 65 Queen Street in the City of Port-of-Spain” (1988, 186). The first devil bands were composed of sixty to seventy men and women in Jab-Jab costumes. The principal character, identifiable by his crown and more elaborate costuming, was Lucifer. Procope and his informants note that until 1909 there had been few innovations. That year, Jones, with Skeedo Philips and Valere, brought out a new band that they called the “Red Dragon Band” because Jones had come across an illustrated copy of Dante’s Inferno and decided to include more characters “from the retinue of hell” (187). In 1910, they introduced both Beelzebub and the beast or dragon. Satan became a member of the contingent in 1911, and he carried a book and a pen in order to record sins. At its apogee, the dragon band consisted of imps, beasts, and gownsmen, with the latter forming the majority of the band in their long capes with biblical scenes painted on them. The band’s dramatic centerpiece was the dragon mask. Initially, this costume was simple. It was made out of papier-mâché and carried on poles, and large fish scales were fashioned and positioned on the costume so that they would lie flat or bristle. This improvisational character of the early dragon costumes corroborates Walcott’s positive valorization of waste, ephemera, and obsolescence as internal to the practice of a transcendent mimicry. Later, the dragon-mask costume assumed greater complexity of design and meaning with attached scales, movable tongue, and chains that went out in three or four directions. These chains were held by imps who controlled the dragon’s advance. The dragon’s movements consisted of exaggerated

56 Dispossession, Nonpossession, Self-Possession

lunges as it struck out at the imps (191). The repeated combination of movements (the lunging and restraint) that the dragon performs effectively communicates the threat that it will break its bonds, attack the imps, and, by implication, assault the viewing public. Consistent with carnival’s multifarious conflations of the sacred and profane, the beast’s “chains of darkness” (187) function on two overlapping semantic levels. The most obvious reference is biblical. But it does not require a stretch of the imagination to comprehend that bondage, the presence and sound of chains in the city’s streets, the related cracking of Jab-Jabs’ whips, and the dragon’s restricted movements harken back to the days of slavery. This partially hidden meaning does not subvert the religious allusion but accompanies it subterraneously, shadowing its socially sanctioned discursive possibilities by also seeking to remind spectators of a history of colonial oppression and then hinting at an imminent liberation. Central to the dragon’s effectiveness is its ability to conjure these thresholds of a partially visible world in a form and style of lower-frequency politics. Procope describes two other dances that the dragon performs on particular occasions. The first of these also intertwines religious and colonial/historical references and specifically incorporates the crossing of thresholds in its repertoire. Frequently called the “ballet of crossing the water,” this first dance is also known as “the coming out,” “the invocation,” and “crossing the water.” The dance focused on crossing the city’s drains without touching water; as a figure whose natural element was fire, the dragon would make a spectacle of its fear of coming into contact with water. The imps, in turn, would tease the dragon and attempt to have it fall in the water. When the dragon was finally allowed to cross the drain, it would do so in an exaggerated leap and with a great deal of bustle and bother (193–94). Again, the point is that the dance’s hidden significance surreptitiously gains a degree of recognition by virtue of its partial presence in a public arena. “The coming out” is an allusion to spirit possession; “crossing the water” is a dance that arguably invokes the Middle Passage. The other dance that the dragon mask performs involves forms of mimicry and “play” as I described them in the introduction. This loosely defined choreography negotiates and establishes territorial boundaries and can be associated, at the level of collective participation, with the various competitions between neighborhood institutions such as steel bands and mas’ camps in Trinidad, cabildos in Cuba, and samba schools

Dispossession, Nonpossession, Self-Possession 57

in Brazil. This dance represents the dragon’s most important demonstration of symbolic warriorhood. Procope and his informants describe it as follows: In the days when each band had its tent and its “chantwell” and members met each night to discuss the progress of costumes, listen to the “chantwell” and practise their steps, the fight of the beast was one of the main events of the carnival. There was a reigning beast, a man so dexterous and inventive in his dancing and portrayal of the beast as to be acclaimed best. Each year aspirants for his crown would “challenge him to combat.” The challenge to combat occurred automatically when two bands met for the first time. The combat took the form of the execution by the reigning beast of various dance steps which the challenger had to imitate. If he succeeded in imitating them he then executed steps of his own for the reigning beast to imitate. The beast who first failed to imitate the other’s steps lost the contest. To be the reigning beast was considered the highest honour and the practices before carnival were carried on with great concentration by those intending to portray beasts. (193; emphasis added)

What distinguishes this dance from the others is that mimicry is the basis on which “combatants” compete. This arena and the choreographed moves that take place in it exemplify Drewal’s observations on Yoruba “play.” Also related to her research is the way in which the dragon’s victory is only possible by means of inimitable improvisation. This search for differentiation by transcending repetition not only disclaims the view that mimicry is reducible to unconscious imitation but also illustrates how differences between communities are made evident through and beyond mimetic acts. In this dance—and I cannot help but recall Marx’s idea that nineteenth-century revolutions needed “to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again more gigantic before them” (1978, 597–98)—adversaries are indispensable for the process of rearticulating and reaffirming identity. Finally, the theory that Procope and his informants provide in order to explain the dragon band’s significance focuses on the Christian religious calendar and the temporary incarnation of evil before the beginning of Lent. It is worth noting in this description that the dragon band’s seriousness or even solemnity is related to the members’ awareness of underlying social tensions and their role in them: The theory is that the dragon band is an ambulatory depiction of Satan and his horde cast from Heaven. Theoretically he and his followers return to earth on the two days before the Lenten season commences in

58 Dispossession, Nonpossession, Self-Possession

order during “the forty days and forty nights” to try the virtue of the faithful. It seems that though this theory is fairly wide-spread and well known, the persons who play this kind of mas’ feel no reluctance in portraying the forces of evil and regard it merely as a means of enjoying themselves. Undoubtedly however, some individuals go through periods of great excitement preparing to play this type of mas’ and seem to be completely absorbed during this period with thoughts of the two days of revelry to come. (1988, 189)

Judging by the undertones here, this mask has more significance for its players than simple masquerading and jubilant abandon. Procope hints at the tensions that their underlying seriousness occasions when he observes that band members claim not to have any superstitions about bearing this mask and that the only misgivings come from their relatives and the general public who are concerned that such portrayals “fly in the face of God” and may be the subject of some “curse or blight” (195). Since the appropriation of religious references for secular purposes and the conjuring of the underworld have long been traditional in many occidental carnivals, it is curious that the fear of damnation should constitute a concern not for the band members but for their relatives and the public at large. Evidently, accompanying this language about retribution is the general awareness that to wear a dragon or devil mask is a form of transgression that threatens to exceed the thresholds of sanctioned public behavior. Dispossession versus Nonpossession In The Dragon Can’t Dance, there is no levity or mockery in the portrayal of the dragon nor of carnival as a whole. In fact, the narrator saves words such as “masquerade” and “costume” to parody those who look ridiculous because they barter something of themselves for upward mobility—like Sylvia, who appears at Aldrick’s door at the beginning of the novel in an “outlandish costume” of awkward, middle-class aspirations (1979, 42), or when the steel-band tents become concert halls instead of gathering places for warriors (61–62). Daniel Crowley notes that “[m]askers take themselves and the masques they play very seriously. There is no question in their minds of the importance of their esthetic activities, and the real achievement of obtaining recognition as a great masker from the critical Trinidad public” (1988a, 179). Evidently, what began over two hundred years before as the planter class’s inver-

Dispossession, Nonpossession, Self-Possession 59

sion of social hierarchies for roughly two days in the year had simultaneously been transformed by slaves, their descendants, and others into the site and occasion of an earnest reaffirmation of identity in the face of a history of socioeconomic oppression. Rex Nettleford argues that “to the ordinary people, festival arts are more than minstrelsy; they affirm the use of the mask, literally and metaphorically, in coming to terms or coping with an environment that has yet to work in their interest, a society that is yet to be mastered and controlled by them, despite the coming of Independence” (1988, 194). Lovelace has gone even further by elucidating the contemporary radical transformation of this critique or historical complaint to reveal what has come to replace the dragon’s symbolic choreography. The author’s analysis of this particular postindependence condition—in other words, the reason why the dragon cannot dance—has been not only prophetic but fully applicable to certain aspects of Trinidad and Tobago’s cultural politics today. The novel’s initial presentation of the dragon mask connects the Hill’s philosophy of nonpossession to Aldrick’s unreflexive and selfless willingness to serve the community as its dragon prior to his quest for selfpossession. A certain visual literacy or insight is required in order to discern this coherence in the mask and its annual reconstruction. While the general public does not witness the creation of the mask nor experience the atmosphere of “holiness” or the “attitude of reverence” and “ceremonial solemnity” with which the youngster Basil attends Aldrick— just as the latter had attended his Uncle Freddie during his apprenticeship—Aldrick urges spectators to interpret the meanings behind his mas’ and performance (1979, 35): In truth, it was in a spirit of priesthood that Aldrick addressed his work; for, the making of his dragon costume was to him always a new miracle, a new test not only of his skill but of his faith: for though he knew exactly what he had to do, it was only by faith that he could bring alive from these scraps of cloth and tin that dragon, its mouth breathing fire, its tail threshing the ground, its nine chains rattling, that would contain the beauty and threat and terror that was the message he took each year to Port of Spain. It was in this message that he asserted before the world his self. It was through it that he demanded that others see him, recognize his personhood, be warned of his dangerousness. (35–36)

Aldrick wishes the knowledge of his identity, that is, his “personhood” and not necessarily his name, to be based on a precise craft (a combination

60 Dispossession, Nonpossession, Self-Possession

of “skill” and “faith”) through which he mobilizes the dragon mask and demasks spectators in the streets. This desire to reaffirm his identity presupposes social invisibility; it arises out of an awareness that Calvary Hill’s countercultural commitment to an ideology of nonpossession is confined to a particular vicinity of the city and that it is only at this time of the year that the community’s intransigence is permitted to manifest itself as the spectacle and outbreak of carnival spirit in the streets of the capital. Aldrick thus flaunts his invisibility and that of his community by donning a frightful and unnerving disguise: “He wanted everybody to see him. When they saw him, they had to be blind not to see” (124). And he thrusts his invisibility into public consciousness, so to speak, through a conspicuous “tall, rejoicing dance, cry” (127). The dragon mask, in short, performs what the viewer can potentially see but fails or refuses to see. What is rarely obvious to onlookers in the streets of Port of Spain is the piety with which Aldrick incorporates histories of nonpossession into the construction of the mask itself. As a craftsman who historicizes “invisible” lives, no part of Aldrick’s creation is left meaningless or without use: “[E]very thread he sewed, every scale he put on the body of the dragon, was a thought, a gesture, an adventure, a name that celebrated some part of his journey to and his surviving upon this hill. He worked, as it were, in a flood of memories, not trying to assemble them, to link them to get a linear meaning, but letting them soak him through and through; and his life grew before him in the texture of his paint and the angles of his dragon’s scales, as he worked” (36). Upon working the memory of his grandfather into the dragon (36–37), and including in the latticework the exodus of his grandmother and his two unmarried aunts from rural Manzanilla to St. James on the outskirts of the capital (39), Aldrick’s dragon becomes an archive of unfulfilled promises, obstinate hope, and “the miracle of their surviving” (40). However, Aldrick is not the first to compile his family’s archive through such an assemblage. It was from his Uncle Freddie that he learned both how to build the dragon and that it was counterproductive to hurry, so that his uncle’s “[t]ake it easy, worked now into his dragon and its growing story of lives of miracle and manness and faith” (41). From his father and uncle he inherits a “sense of miracle and manness” in spite of destitution (41), and he annually employs this feeling to create a visual repository for his genealogy and philosophy of life.

Dispossession, Nonpossession, Self-Possession 61

In addition to his role as the creator and keeper of this visual archive, Aldrick is also responsible for mediating the Hill’s identity through dance. Every year, a few days before carnival, the community would spontaneously meet at Aldrick’s living quarters in the Yard. Because his choreography was supposed to be a secret, he would initially refuse to perform it for them. However, as people began to gather round, and the children’s curiosity and admiration encouraged him, he would challenge one of the children to follow (in) his steps: And the child would step forward, if he was brave, and if he was not, another—a brave one—would come out, and the men would start to sing louder and the music would get hotter, and the child would be opposite him, and they would dance, like they were having a contest, each one showing off his moves, each one showing off his beauty, and pretty soon everybody would join in, and the whole Yard would be singing and dancing. There was no set day for this to take place, and though it was usually a day or two before Carnival, it just happened: a feeling just came over everybody and they said, “Let’s go by Aldrick today,” and they came and the thing took place. It was just as if the day chose itself, and people came. (106–7)

This choreographed combat and apprenticeship is a prelude to the culmination of a collective self-awareness. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson illustrates the importance of literacy and the act of reading newspapers and novels for the concretization of a national consciousness.4 Aldrick’s performance accomplishes a similar task by interpellating the community in a spontaneous invocation of the carnival spirit, in the immediacy of a sense of belonging. The artist himself defines his place and role in this activity: “You see me here, I is thirty-one years old. Never had a regular job in my life or a wife or nutten. I ain’t own house or car or radio or racehorse or store. I don’t own one thing in this fucking place, except that dragon there, and the dragon ain’t even mine. I just make it. It just come out of me like a child who ain’t really his father own or his mother own” (110). Clearly, the relationship that Aldrick establishes spontaneously between himself and the Hill is founded on the absence of material possessions so that his life, as it were, also emblematizes the Hill’s philosophy of nonpossession. Herein lies the completeness of Aldrick’s interpellation by an ideology of nonpossession. Aldrick assumes his annual role as a human trope of historical and genealogical meaning when he dons his mask. The first day of carnival

62 Dispossession, Nonpossession, Self-Possession

sets in motion a series of customary activities and expectations: “with only the memory burning in his blood . . . [Aldrick] felt, as he put on his dragon costume, a sense of entering a sacred mask that invested him with an ancestral authority to uphold before the people of this Hill, this tribe marooned so far from the homeland that never was their home” (120). I would like to explore this moment of transcendence a little further. The narrator claims that the Hill’s inhabitants remember their African ancestors and gods “if not in the brain, certainly in the blood” (120). Yet, what exactly is the status and role of a memory that burns in the blood if this recollection ends up recalling a “homeland that never was their home”? In order to answer this question, it is necessary to conceptualize blood not as a biological fact but primarily as access to corporeal/historical knowledge through performance—what Clark theorizes as lieux de mémoire. According to this view, these bloodlines and the memory that flows through them transcend imposed geographical borders and real deterritorializations to produce a communal sentiment based on an appreciation for the dragon’s dance. In other words, what this awareness of memory in the blood accomplishes is the definition, rationalization, and advocacy of the Hill’s place in the African dispora. And it is precisely this connection that Aldrick establishes when he puts on his mas’: For two full days Aldrick was a dragon in Port of Spain, moving through the loud, hot streets, dancing the bad-devil dance, dancing the stickman dance, dancing Sylvia and Inez and Basil and his grandfather and the Hill and the fellars by the Corner, leaning against the wall, waiting for the police to raid them. He was Manzanilla, Calvary Hill, Congo, Dahomey, Ghana. He was Africa, the ancestral Masker, affirming the power of the warrior, prancing and bowing, breathing out fire, lunging against his chains, threatening with his claws, saying to the city: “I is a dragon. I have fire in my belly and claws on my hands; watch me! Note me well, for I am ready to burn down your city. I am ready to tear you apart, limb by limb.” (123–24)

In his role as “ancestral Masker,” Aldrick invokes the diaspora—that is, the home that affirmatively mimics the homeland through the edifying process of internal differentiation and identity rearticulation such as the one that I examined in Drewal’s account in the last chapter. However, for obvious historical reasons, the fact cannot be elided that this home in the Caribbean had initially been forced upon its dwellers. Hence,

Dispossession, Nonpossession, Self-Possession 63

it is crucial to emphasize that the will to destroy that Aldrick expresses in the final part of this passage is innate to his choreography (breathing fire, lunging, threatening) only insofar as this urge engages with initial and evolving forms of oppression. Dispossession versus Nonpossession versus Self-Possession In Trinidad’s carnival, there exists a tacit agreement between masked subjects like the dragon and the public whereby the former will stop threatening or verbally abusing onlookers for a small fee. Benítez-Rojo reports the existence of a similar practice in the snake-killing dances that took place during Cuba’s Día de los Reyes festivities (1997, 206). In any case, Aldrick decides to break the long-standing tradition and refuses to accept any money. “He wanted it to be known that he was for real, that you couldn’t just offer him a coin and he would disappear” (1979, 124). The prospect that the dragon’s “menace” cannot be dissolved by a token payoff bewilders and frightens some observers; they immediately react by calling him “crazy” and claim that he is looking for trouble (124). The vehemence of these accusations expose the deep anxiety of spectators as Aldrick’s actions demask their social status. In rejecting this gratuity, Aldrick discards one of the principal features of his mask’s traditional social functions at carnival time. Demasking the public in this manner marks a profound transformation in the dragon mask and its performance. Lovelace’s novel illustrates how Calvary Hill’s unity slowly and irrevocably begins to disintegrate. I have noted that when the cry “all o’ we is one” rings false, it is usually uttered by those who have abandoned the Hill’s ideology of nonpossession and seek to compensate for their marginalization and/or guilt. Had there been unity in the first place, there would have been no need to voice an already self-evident fact, no reason to enunciate and supplement through language an obvious unity with such insistence. In a period of growing alienation in the community, it makes sense that the Hill’s fragmentation should later manifest itself in Aldrick’s decision not to bring out the dragon the following year. Upon taking this decision, Aldrick begins to reflect on his life and future instead of living for his annual portrayal: “It was as if he had outgrown it or something. But, what was he without the dragon? Who was he? What was there to define himself? What would he be able to point to and say: This is Aldrick? What?” (150). This soul-searching intensifies at the same time that “[t]he

64 Dispossession, Nonpossession, Self-Possession

power of the Dragon even to threaten was coming to an end” (164), so that Aldrick is obliged to step outside of his sole function as the Hill’s dragon. He explains the transformation as follows: It seemed to him that they were losing a battle with the times, with the people on the Hill. The people wanted to move on, to change, to make peace with their condition, to surrender that rebellion they had lived for generations; and they saw Fisheye, Aldrick, and the other fellars at the Corner, boxed increasingly into that rectangle of pavement and street at the side of the shop at the foot of the Hill as the witnesses to that bequeathal, who continued to fight on, whose eyes disturbed, challenged, accused them of abandoning their sacred war, that they (Fisheye and Aldrick and the fellars) continued to wage. So that these people began to view them, these rebels, not so much as the disturbing conscience they had become, but as the root cause of their problems. (166)

As far as the Hill is concerned, Aldrick and Fisheye have outlasted the community’s need for warriors of any sort. This obsolescence, however, is a temporal as well as a qualitative determination. In Aldrick’s mind, “losing a battle with the times” seems concurrent or even coterminous with the end of a “rebellion they had lived for generations.” This formulation, in which the passage of a universal time and its underlying notion of progress are held responsible for the erosion of a countercultural form and its subversive practices, deserves further attention. It is essential to state at this point that while The Dragon Can’t Dance displays in its cast of characters diverse, shifting degrees of allegiance over time to the Hill’s ideology of nonpossession, the novel is also succinct about the political and socioeconomic reasons why these profound changes take place and still continue. Even though these changes are undoubtedly transcultural, they are not depoliticized. In the novel, Lovelace does not depict change as a homogeneous, isolated loss but as the complex dispositions of competing human subjectivities and the manner in which their engagements constitute the community’s overall character. Consequently, the politics on a lower frequency that traditionally made Aldrick’s dragon socially effective for the Hill—that is, its performed invocations of social antagonisms—shifts into a different and “nontraditional” configuration: “Something had happened. They had jobs now, had responsibility now for the surviving of families, they could no longer afford rebellion at the Corner. . . . They had to choose, they felt; and it was because they were unable to hold in their minds the

Dispossession, Nonpossession, Self-Possession 65

two contradictory ideas—their resistance and surviving, their rebellion and their decency” (164). This inability to hold the contradictions together—to be, in other words, in a position in which they could choose, negotiate, and draw borders between reputation and respectability—is responsible for unhinging Aldrick from his original, signifying role. Nevertheless, when Aldrick discards his mask, he does not (and cannot) extract himself from the socioeconomic conditions that forced him and the community to adhere to their ideology of nonpossession in the first place. Rather, he inadvertently discovers that in this crisis of warriorhood the intransigence that he so carefully cultivated and choreographed beneath the surface of his mask no longer requires veiling. A brief look at the organization of the novel’s chapters provides us with a context for Aldrick’s departure from his lower-frequency politics. Referring to the day after carnival and the beginning of the Lenten period of fasting, the chapter called “Ash Wednesday” focuses on both a return to old antagonisms and the beginning of subtle changes within the community for several main characters. For Aldrick, the new period signifies an unusual self-consciousness and premonition: “He felt a great distance from himself, and he thought that he would like to try to come home to himself; and even though it sounded like some kind of treason, he felt that at least it was the only way he could begin to be true to even the promise of the dragon to which he felt bound in some way beyond reason, beyond explanation, and which he felt had its own truth” (132). The chapter “The New Yard” describes the exacerbation of changes in the air, so that even Aldrick “felt himself a stranger” in his little shack (150). “Outcasts” illustrates the disintegration and formation of allegiances as some of the Hill’s inhabitants turn against one another. This chapter shows, for instance, how in professing that he still belongs to the community in a clearly assimilative politics of belonging—“I is we” (157)—the calypsonian, Philo, carries out the empty gestures of a false claim to allegiance and a meaningless “performance” (157–58). The following chapter, “The Dragon Dance,” describes an uprising against the government that takes place after Aldrick has decided to abandon his costume. But what sort of “dance” is this in which Aldrick abandons his traditional social function to reveal, unbeknownst to all including himself, a revolutionary zeal? In this new scenario, Aldrick and Fisheye (the relentless warrior and maroon figure whose threat is never disguised in the novel) complement

66 Dispossession, Nonpossession, Self-Possession

each other in the same improvised choreography of social protest. Since they had been the Hill’s foremost rebels, Aldrick’s lower-frequency politics and Fisheye’s physically combative warriorhood formerly composed a dynamic continuum through which Calvary Hill could reiterate its coherence. While Aldrick unquestioningly facilitated a community spirit from year to year, Fisheye faithfully policed its borders at the bottom of the Hill brazenly demanding “toll payments” from “outsiders” like Pariag, the Indo-Trinidadian entrepreneur who lived on the Hill. The community respected both rebels for the ways in which they fought and defeated dragons and “Bad Johns” (famous “warriors” and/or toughs) from other communities, thereby permitting the Hill to recognize and maintain its collective strength and influence. At the same time, Aldrick and Fisheye cultivated their modes of warriorhood in relative separation; that is, until they saw themselves “boxed increasingly” into a small space from which they would have to wage their “sacred war,” isolated in the new conciliatory mood of the times. Understandably, both rebels, “flagbearers of a disappearing warriorhood” (152), break out of this confining space united in their bid to continue struggling. Unaccustomed to this blatant exhibition and deployment of undisguised force, Aldrick has obviously abandoned his lower-frequency politics and adopted the Bad Johns’ aggressive postures and activities. Open rebellion is the undisguised dragon dance that Aldrick, Fisheye, and their cohorts perform. After some uncertainty and an unforeseen incident with a truck—“the miracle [that] would happen” (171), proof of the relevance of mimicry’s improvisational requirements to the political arena—they capture two policemen, commandeer their jeep, and drive around Port of Spain. They shoot in the air, calling themselves the People’s Liberation Army, and make fiery, impromptu speeches from their vehicle as they circle Woodford Square (the public forum that Eric Williams, the nation’s first prime minister, called the University of Woodford Square and from where he demanded independence from the British colonial government in 1956). Their improvised “choreography” is itself a commentary on the nature of the rebellion: “They needed no plan. To require a plan was to question the very truth of their cause and the bravery of their soldiers” (171). Although he is at first hesitant, Aldrick discovers that his new role is similar to that of his dragon mask during carnival: “He felt the calm power of a man surrounded by miracles. . . . As the jeep cruised slowly down the street . . . he had a feeling of being

Dispossession, Nonpossession, Self-Possession 67

imprisoned in a dragon costume on Carnival Tuesday” (177). There is a measure of discomfort in this new role—he feels “imprisoned”—but his extemporaneous speech indicates that the imprisonment derives from a particular dilemma for which his confinement in the jeep is an entirely appropriate metaphor: Make no peace with slavery. . . . Make no peace, for you have survived. You are here filling up the shanty towns, prisons, slums, street corners, mental asylums, brothels, hospitals. Make no peace with shanty towns, dog shit, piss. We have to live as people, people. We have to rise. Rise up. But how do you rise up when your brothers are making peace for a few dollars? When sisters selling their souls, and mothers and fathers selling their children. How can you rise with rent to pay and children to school, and watch hunger march across your yard and camp inside your house? How can you not make peace?” (179)

For Aldrick there seems to be no agenda beyond their uprising, beyond the appropriated police jeep that becomes the rebels’ “prison” in the end because when they require food and gasoline, they cannot risk stopping to obtain them. It is as if the rebels themselves act so as to generate that Marxian point of no return. In any case, open rebellion and the dragon dance are equated from this point on in the novel. When he defends their case and indirectly comments on the dilemma and impotence that seemed to lay at the heart of their rebellion, the rebels’ lawyer draws limits around their “dance”: “The authorities trusted these men to fail, that is why they made no move to stop them. They trusted that they would be unable to make of their frustration anything better than a dragon dance, a threatening gesture; that is why they did not attempt to stop them” (183). In trusting that they would fail, the authorities seem to place full faith in the ability of their own masks of cynical reason to withstand the strife. Also, while they serve their prison sentences, Fisheye valorizes their performance in terms that recall Aldrick’s threats to destroy the city: “I can’t say they jail me for nutten; we play mas’, eh? We really play a mas’. We really had them frighten. We had them wondering if we was going to shoot down the town or what. We really play a mas’ eh, Aldrick? You couldn’t play a better dragon.” Agreeing, Aldrick replies: “Yes, we played a mas’. . . . We played a dragon” (186). This almost complete fusion of protest and carnival in a single impulse corroborates Koningsbruggen’s claim that the relation between both is one of “intonation rather than detonation” (1997, 248). While it is certain

68 Dispossession, Nonpossession, Self-Possession

that the dragon mask can’t dance, that is to say, that the mask itself is slowly losing its ability to rally the communities that it represented, its choreography is still performable. Fisheye defends this view when he asserts that the rebels had been successful at frightening the whole nation. Reaffirming the importance of this dimension of undisguised, political resistance, Lovelace states in an interview with H. Nigel Thomas that “[t]he task of the restricted person is to struggle against those barriers that are preventing his being. The whole business of enslavement is such a barrier, and that is why you find it is the entire preoccupation of some people. In fact, that is why at the end of The Dragon Can’t Dance, you will see Aldrick and Fisheye—those people who have not surrendered in a certain dimension—making their resistance a living expression of themselves, so that their entire life is that struggle—the others have been struggling too in other ways” (1991, 12). Dispossession versus Self-Possession The general consensus on the dragon’s inability to dance expresses a lament for the loss of unity, community spirit, warriorhood, and symbolic performances. According to the frame of reference that I have employed to elucidate this lament, the gradual capitulation of the Hill’s tradition and ideology of nonpossession explains the loss of the carnival spirit (best exemplified by those phatic utterances of the phrase “all o’ we is one”) and Aldrick’s concurrent decision to abandon his mask in search of a “selfhood” apart from his role in the community. Yet in The Dragon Can’t Dance, Lovelace’s analysis of the construction and transformation of social meaning and resistance within national culture has more profound implications for the future than the mere expression of a lament. By establishing direct links between the end of traditional, symbolic practices and the warriors’ rebellion, Lovelace is in essence asking: what access to the public sphere and to visibility will “invisible” stories, lives, and people have if these practices are no longer able to substantiate their historical complaints? In Dash’s view, “both traditional carnival as well as traditional revolution must yield to some new strategy that combines powerlessness and resistance, overt consent with new forms of opposition and self-preservation” (1998, 132). Lovelace illustrates that a ready alternative to this alienation is open rebellion. Moreover, in keeping with mimicry’s flexibility, he also reveals the fact that no agenda

Dispossession, Nonpossession, Self-Possession 69

and, by implication, no grand narratives are needed for these and future forms of rebellion.5 Two contingencies give rise to this alternative. First, the Hill’s intransigence does not disappear: the socioeconomic conditions that gave rise to its ideology of nonpossession in the first instance do not vanish but persist with greater sophistication. Aldrick’s admission in the most dramatic moment of the uprising that he does not know how to conserve a spirit of rebellion and simultaneously secure the family unit’s economic well-being and future is sincere and fully reveals the dilemma that Calvary Hill faces. But this troubling doubt with its consequential lack of a “plan” is more honorable than the road that Philo takes, which is to distort the Hill’s original “all o’ we is one” into his “I is we.” His is a posture afforded by an incipient culture industry that makes this calypsonian confuse his unique competitiveness in the marketplace with his ability to represent the community to which he had previously belonged. Philo’s self-styled mode of representativeness differs from the dragon’s collectively inspired choreography during carnival, which, for its own continuity, requires the presence and engagement of opponents. Competition in Philo’s terms is not based on mimicry’s reciprocal practices of internal differentiation but on exclusivity. And it is the availability of this assimilative, bourgeois “I” that fragments the Hill into its varying degrees of allegiance to its ideology of nonpossession. The second contingency has historical and political implications for the “autonomous” nation-state. In postindependence Trinidad and Tobago, the lower-frequency politics of the mask that camouflages “unofficial” stories and historical complaints under the noses of British authorities is no longer required. Independence has been taken to mean the repudiation of colonial laws and regulations that sought to determine what could and could not be expressed in the streets at carnival time. But continuing contradictions inform this “official” realization of political autonomy. What, after independence, has come to replace, for instance, the dragon’s critique of the socioeconomic conditions that confined it to the Hill and to a social invisibility that it ingeniously attempted to subvert through its mask and choreography? After he completes his prison sentence, Aldrick discovers the answer to this question when he is told to his astonishment that there had been “[t]wo thousand people playing devil in Port of Spain” (1979, 195). How-

70 Dispossession, Nonpossession, Self-Possession

ever, his elation soon subsides when his informant interjects: “Not real devil, you know. Fancy devil, with lamé and silk and satin. Pretty devil” (195).6 On a broader scale, this shift to fancy carnival, to celebrations without critique (the results of which have been the contemporary homogenization of costumes, musical beats, and lyrics), and to quests for profound meaning often through nostalgia, is a relentlessly repeated complaint today among observers of Caribbean festivals. That it is at all possible to recognize and interrogate this situation emerges from an internal contradiction (as opposed to imperialism’s external pressures) in which the rhetorical celebration of the nation’s independence and sovereignty has been used to disguise the continuity of the previous colonial socioeconomic order. Both contingencies, the persistence of that order and the “official” acknowledgment of the nation’s political autonomy, contradict each other in the eyes of those who have experienced few improvements since independence. Hence, when the rebels choose to circle Woodford Square in the police jeep, it is as if this maneuver, an implicit criticism of the country’s politicians as well as a longing for social justice, could rekindle the hopefulness that independence had originally held out. This postindependence contradiction seems to have no other outlet—especially since the rhetoric about independence implies that countercultural masks and their traditionally subliminal preservation of historical complaints are no longer required in a free and independent state—except through the undisguised, spontaneous uprising that the rebels’ activities emblematize in the novel. Aldrick’s sensation that the police jeep that he and the others commandeered imprisoned him in a costume elucidates the nature of the rebels’ uprising. He interprets this feeling further when he recalls in prison that “[e]ven with guns in we hand, even with power, we was looking to somebody else to make a decision. . . . Even when we have power, when we have guns. Is like we ain’t have no self. I mean, we have a self but the self we have is for somebody else. Is like even when we acting we ain’t the actor” (188). Aldrick realizes the degree to which the drama of appropriating the jeep, kidnapping its police officers, shooting in the air, and arbitrarily calling themselves the People’s Liberation Army was a strangely foreign script, an unfamiliar form of mimicry that they had not wanted to write, much less perform. This alienation from their own “revolution” does not mean that their dragon dance was unsuccessful, however. There is a particular necessity that is being expressed here. Ac-

Dispossession, Nonpossession, Self-Possession 71

cording to Zˇiˇzek, “the task of the critique of ideology . . . is precisely to discern the hidden necessity in what appears as a mere contingency” (1994, 4). Brydon associates Aldrick’s uprising with the 1970 Black Power uprising or revolution claiming that “[w]hile the timing and nature of Fisheye and Aldrick’s ‘mas’ separate it quite clearly from the 1970 revolution, the novel’s abortive revolt does comment indirectly on the failure of the real-life uprising. Most accounts speak of 1970 in terms of Carnival violence, either continued beyond its bounds or transformed into a new revolutionary energy” (1989, 329). Yet the 1970 Black Power movement or revolution is not reducible to the carnivalesque—that was never its intention; it was the protest that was spontaneous. Local journalist Raoul Pantin reported that the country “reverberated to the shuffle of thousands of marching feet and voices roaring, ‘power to the people!’ It was a wholly unplanned, truly spontaneous street protest that appeared, on the surface, to spring out of nowhere. But it had older historic origins” (1990, 4). The idea that the novel’s revolt is “abortive” and the real uprising a “failure” is plausible only if the ultimate measure of a successful revolution is the complete overthrow of the government. Aldrick clearly asserts that any plan and, by implication, the adoption of any revolutionary agenda, would “question the very truth of their cause.” In other words, frightening the population into seeing and acknowledging social injustices, that is to say, demasking the public, is the mark of a successful dragon mask and dance.7 It is only by defining “success” in these terms that Aldrick can be given credit for his sincerely proffered, “I don’t know.” For while he certainly decries the disintegration of the Hill’s ideology of nonpossession, its alienation and incipient materialism, he does not refuse the community its freedom to work and educate and feed its children under the postindependence regime. Aldrick’s “I don’t know” marks the conscious limits of a threshold between dispossession and self-possession beyond which he refuses to take his street protest. It is a decision for which he takes responsibility and even expresses pride. Therefore, my reading of Aldrick’s quest for self-possession stresses the protagonist’s capacity to make a calculated choice in the face of profound national dilemmas in which, as Pantin aptly puts it, “young black Trinidadians . . . revolt against their own freely-elected black government in the name of Black Power” (1990, 9). Aldrick’s search for self-possession, in other words, should not be seen as the triumph of individualism over collective alienation. Stephano

72 Dispossession, Nonpossession, Self-Possession

Harney, for example, claims that Aldrick’s abandonment of the dragon mask illustrates how Lovelace rejects group identity (1996, 44). Burton asserts along similar lines that “[c]arnival . . . is not revolutionary because, for all its empty ethos of ‘all o’ we is one,’ the values it upholds are ultimately individualistic and spontaneous, not collective and organized” (1997, 218). In arriving at his conclusion, Burton assumes that that “empty ethos” belonged to the Hill in the first place. Yet the novel clearly illustrates that it is those characters who are outside or on the margins of the community who utter the phrase in order to alleviate their discomfort and self-consciousness. In the final analysis, Aldrick’s decision to interrogate his own stance is not a question of mere capitulation in the face of overwhelming odds. It is a valiant engagement with a still unresolved issue, and it is for this reason that he later takes pride in his enigmatic confession. If Lovelace astutely depicts the hazards of these postindependence choices, he also offers a solution. Toward the end of The Dragon Can’t Dance, Aldrick becomes, after much introspection, conscientiously selfless and seeks out Sylvia “not to claim her, but to help her claim herself ” (1979, 203) by not marrying into the materialistic lifestyle of Guy, the neighborhood’s rent collector. When we read that both characters eventually accept each other’s love—for this harmony was painstakingly achieved—we are led to understand that this selflessness and its rejection of materialism have won out. “Aldrick,” according to Ramchand, “can begin to participate in the system because with the emergence of a self anxious to grow, it is possible at last to possess things without being possessed by them, to take part in the world without selling the self to the world” (1988, 10). Ultimately, this solution, to possess oneself by becoming selfless, does not return the dragon to its traditional signifying function. It seeks, rather, to provide an appropriate spirit of self-possession for the troubling inequities of the postindependence nation’s internal contradictions.

CHAPTER TWO The New Visibilities Middle-Class Cosmopolitanism in the Street

We know very little of Carnival really. It is fairly certain that ultimately the sociological investigators and the psychologists will find that a great deal of what has been done and what is being done in the preparation and organisation of Carnival is the diversion of energies which would normally have been spent on ordinary social work. This goes very deep into the history of islands like Trinidad and others in the West Indies which are westernized without any nationalisation of their own. Carnival should be investigated along the lines of a substitution by the people for some national activity which was independent of the social life, of the national festivals and other national activities which were imposed on them from outside. —c. l. r. james, “Lincoln, Carnival, George Padmore: Writings from The Nation”

In my reading of the The Dragon Can’t Dance, I hinted at Earl Lovelace’s critique of the encroachment of the Creole middle class and its political and socioeconomic institutions on Port of Spain’s carnival practices.1 Aldrick, for example, complains that sponsorships had been turning the steel-band yards where “warriors” once met into concert halls; the calypsonian, Philo, had left the Hill, placed his talent in the marketplace, and began to claim, in his adherence to a competitive, bourgeois ideology, that “I is we”; and, after he had been released from prison, Aldrick discovers that the dragon mask was being aestheticized and transformed into “pretty mas’.” According to Anthony, this encroachment was marked historically by the work of the preindependence Carnival Improvement Committee—which had been organized in 1927 through the efforts of 73

74 The New Visibilities

the mayor of Port of Spain, Edgar Gaston-Johnston (Anthony 1989, 62), and made official in 1939 (144)—and then, shortly before Trinidad and Tobago’s independence from Great Britain in 1962, by the Carnival Development Committee (CDC). The Carnival Improvement Committee began as a task force of civic leaders and businessmen who, in order to compete with the relatively new “uptown” carnival of the French Creole elites at the Queen’s Park Savannah, decided to stimulate the introduction of “pretty mas’” in the “downtown” festivities. Their innovations succeeded in aestheticizing carnival costumes for middle-class and working-class revelers. Both Koningsbruggen (1997, 125) and Burton (1997, 206) emphasize that the People’s National Movement (PNM), the political party that brought the country to independence, closely associated itself with the national festival. Anthony reports that Dr. Eric Williams, the island’s new premier, declared shortly after his electoral victory in 1956 that the government would take charge of organizing carnival. And, as if to symbolize its “physical presence,” the new government ended up “building bleachers beside the grandstand, at a cost of $80,000” (1989, 260).2 Currently, and because recent government administrations are attempting to locate the country and carve its niche in a global “free market” through the export of ammonia, liquefied natural gas, petroleum, iron carbide, and carnival, the most recent and sophisticated manifestation of the Creole middle class’s attachment to the national festival has become law. On June 14, 1991, Parliament finalized and passed the National Carnival Commission of Trinidad and Tobago Act (also known as Act No. 9 of 1991), which established the commission known familiarly as the NCC. No previous carnival organizing body has ever enjoyed such officialdom. The act not only constitutes a watershed in the historically troubled relations between popular culture and the postindependence nation-state, but also provides government with a hegemonic role as the primary facilitator of the country’s most important public site, event, and display of national culture. For the first time in the country’s history, both the regulation and the official promotion of carnival have been legally assigned to one body. What ultimately lies at issue here are the “new” configurations and strategies of (in)visibility that this legislation brings into play. It is certain, as Koningsbruggen argues, that although various groups or classes have successively dominated in Trinidad’s carnival (1997, 253), the festival still retains its historical role as “an arena in which contest-

The New Visibilities 75

ing values and ideas are dramatized,” so that in the end “the festival does not choose sides” (269). Neils Sampath observes that even though the NCC “is an annual source of irritation for many carnival enthusiasts,” mostly because they perceive “improvements” to be based on “moralistic regulatory applications masked (or masqued?) by economic benefits,” fundamental ambiguities within the NCC’s mandate reveal that the national festival cannot be disciplined (1997, 159–60). Such historically accurate claims, however, do not preclude the critical imperative to scrutinize contemporary strategies to assert and privilege “official” cultural values through the festival. In this parliamentary bid to organize and promote carnival, the use of the term “national” in the commission’s title is highly suspect because, unlike the openness of previous debates about what constitutes the “national” in national culture, this more recent usage attempts to anchor, delineate, and commemorate the festival’s dynamic practices through its own legislative notions of nation and carnival. The fourth clause succinctly itemizes the commission’s goals as follows: (a) to make Carnival a viable national, cultural and commercial enterprise; (b) to provide the necessary managerial and organisational infrastructure for the efficient and effective presentation and marketing of the cultural products of Carnival; and (c) to establish arrangements for ongoing research, the preservation and permanent display of the annual accumulation of Carnival products created each year by the craftsmen, musicians, composers and designers of Carnival.

This piece of legislation envisions a broad national industry. Through an ill-defined and unwieldy conflation of national, cultural, and commercial projects under the aegis of a single “enterprise,” the commission is charged to make carnival “viable.” Not only does this piece of legislation clearly exemplify Fredric Jameson’s observation that “[t]he becoming cultural of the economic, and the becoming economic of the cultural . . . [have] fundamental consequences for the status of mass culture as such” (1998, 60), but it also suggests that carnival, until this legislation, had in some way been unviable. The NCC’s mandate, as far as state managers are concerned, is predicated on the idea that carnival has not yet attained its full potential and that the national festival should be reinforced by the commission’s self-appointed task to furnish managerial, marketing, and archival infrastructures. It might seem fortuitously ironic

76 The New Visibilities

that the state, through this legislation, should now promote a festival that the ruling classes and government vigorously, both by public ordinance and armed enforcement, sought to suppress after emancipation in 1838 and until the 1930s when the Creole middle class began to take greater interest in participating in carnival. In fact, because it has successfully asserted itself within the postindependence nation, the Creole middle class tends to place a great deal of investment in emphasizing and celebrating this irony. From its purview, the legislative attention to carnival should be taken as unequivocal proof of the country’s wherewithal to stage national culture on its own terms. That there should exist so uniquely privileged a historical irony is debatable. An acceptance of this ironic reading of Trinidad’s contemporary carnival presumes the agency of an ahistorical, hegemonic state that remained untransformed until the emergence of the Creole middle class. Previous groups have enjoyed the socioeconomic power to record and champion their own roles in the island’s festival, but this ironic reading marginalizes the cultural contributions of the mostly black, urban lower class to carnival. It is also a version of the facts that conceals the gradual transformations in which this group’s contributions to the national festival are, through various state and commercial subsidies, being relegated to certain nostalgic formats that are assigned their place and visibility in the street celebrations.3 Koningsbruggen observes that “[t]he cultural homelessness of the middle class makes it to some extent dependent on the cultural production of the lower class” (1997, 240). At the same time, he also argues, carnival annually forces the middle class to confront its “divided nature” (242–43), to face, as it were, the contingencies of its own demasking. Positioned between its desire, on the one hand, to attain the white elite’s socioeconomic prestige and its sympathy for black, lower-class values on the other, the Creole middle class plies an ambiguous course toward self-realization on the national scene. Nevertheless, this “cultural homelessness” is not a disabling, pathological condition but frequently constitutes a duplicitous but strategic stance. The National Carnival Commission Act, to the extent that it satisfies the middle class’s desire to make carnival its own showpiece, has taken this “homelessness” to new heights of legal and cultural sophistication. I agree with Koningsbruggen when he points out that despite its dominance, the middle class has not annexed carnival nor turned it into an exclusive forum for its own ideas

The New Visibilities 77

(263). More complex and intriguing than the suggestion that Act No. 9 of 1991 directly corresponds to a middle-class agenda, however, is the notion of “middle-classization” that Koningsbruggen introduces in his argument.4 Middle-classization in contemporary Trinidad, he states, no longer limits itself to the class where it originated but has become, in varying combinations of attitude, taste, and morality, “the common property of every group in Trinidad society” (194–95). This middle-classization of culture and the relations between this process and carnival is not unique to Trinidad and Tobago. Belinda Edmondson convincingly argues that the invention of Jamaica carnival by that island’s middle-class in the 1980s “obscure[s] a classic class struggle over the symbols of nationhood and cultural identity” (1999, 57). Hence, in addition to the legislation’s middle-classization of national culture, I would further argue that the truly fundamental irony in the NCC’s title is that the term “national” designates local culture insofar as it engages in the ambivalent task of staging carnival not just for local but for international consumption as well. Sections of clause 9 state that in addition to “the regulation, co-ordination or conduct of all carnival activities throughout the country held under the aegis of the Government,” the NCC should work toward enhancing “the possibility of marketing of carnival products and activities in domestic and export markets”; “the contribution by the private sector to the funding of specific aspects of Carnival”; and “the establishment of closer promotional links between the tourist industry and the carnival industry.” The principal purpose of the NCC, therefore, is to internationalize the best image and showcase of Trinidad and Tobago’s national culture as possible. For Sampath, “when Trinidadians discuss making Trinidad ‘more appealing to tourists’ they are, in effect, merely trying to globalise Trinidadian culture and identity for themselves” (1997, 153). This internationalization or globalization of local culture is not merely centrifugal; that is, it is not limited to the government’s unreflexive exportation of local culture. Such internationalization also portends real advantages for policy makers at home. Initiatives to construct and export idealized images of the nation are contemporary examples of practices by governments and the business community who, finding themselves pressured to achieve or maintain consensus about basic economic policies, seek internal accord through favorable international opinions that they endeavor to influence and facilitate for local constituencies. Herein lies

78 The New Visibilities

the full meaning that I would like to give to my use of the term “cosmopolitanism” in this chapter. These practices are by no means unique to Trinidad and Tobago, the Caribbean, or even developing countries. Yet the scenario in which this cosmopolitanism transpires is suffused by a fundamental ambiguity. On the one hand, the desire for international prestige through the public relations promotion of a purportedly welloff, technically progressive, culturally rich, and multiracial nation belies a postindependence and transnational version of the Creole middleclass’s former desire for acceptance by the white colonial elite. One need only peruse the country’s largest daily newspapers in order to observe that what are frequently considered newsworthy are reports from North American or European sources that the country has ranked highly in activities such as sports, the economy, the arts, beauty contests, and so on. On the other hand, the “good news” simultaneously serves to defuse criticism and pacify discontent at home by illustrating the ways in which economic progress is being made and local culture internationally recognized and acclaimed. It is through this neocolonial concern for a “proper” image abroad—a requisite for future foreign investments in the country—that recent government administrations seek and provide positive international opinions to shore up their socioeconomic agendas at home. These neoliberal, socioeconomic practices require what I have termed “new visibilities,” that is, the implementation of visual politics, regimes, and technologies for facilitating and staging the “appropriate” image of national culture for local and international consumption. With respect to carnival, these new visibilities emerge from media attention to the strategic uses and privatization of public performances in select carnival bands during the national festival. In a period of rampant nationalist sentiment—a phenomenon that is not at odds, as I will show, with globalization—the new visibilities posit “masked” subjects who have little need for partially hidden public spaces or for politics on a lower frequency in the ways that these activities and spaces were formerly used. Unlike Aldrick’s abandonment of his dragon mask because the inequities of the postindependence order obliged him to assert an undisguised visibility, those who currently enjoy the new visibilities do so from positions of economic power. There are two areas of inquiry that I would like to explore in this chapter. Neither area is a direct consequence of the NCC legislation, but they enjoy an organic relationship with it. The first examines the

The New Visibilities 79

kind of competencies that are now being “required” of successful mas’ men (costume designers/band leaders) in this legislative scenario and mood. Burton rightly claims that carnival is increasingly becoming “the creation—and creature—of powerful designers and the economic forces” that support them (1997, 213), and Sampath observes that carnival organizers have specialized in different markets depending on the income of band members (1997, 159). Since I have no intention of positing the government and the state as the hegemonic perpetrators of legislative violence on popular culture, I would like to investigate the kinds of unstated collaborations that exist between the legislative encouragement of a cosmopolitan festival and those who are in a socioeconomic position to take advantage of that internationalization at the level of costume design and in other ways. In this manner, it will be possible to show, as Bruce Robbins suggests, how nationalism and cosmopolitanism are compatible (1998, 2). The second area of inquiry attempts to explain how and why the vulgar dancing or winin’ (pelvic gyrations) associated with the jamet or jamette crowd—that is, the disreputable fringe elements of colonial society who lived below the diamètre (diameter) of respectability—has become ubiquitous in public spaces during carnival.5 At a time when carnival has become a showpiece of Creole, middle-class, national identity, the winin’ of many middle-class women in the street seems to demand a redefinition of certain thresholds between reputation and respectability. In this chapter, I present a critique of recent middle-class practices in and around carnival. Given the success with which the Creole middle class has asserted its visibility in the public arena, my aim is to describe recent transformations in this space at carnival time. However, it is also my concern to reflect, as Aldrick in his own way does in The Dragon Can’t Dance, on the risks that are involved for a relatively new nation when any class moves to monopolize a public event that traditionally enhanced the citizen’s right to “stage” his or her critique of national life. In my view, it is the official and unofficial pressures to stifle social critique in the name of “proper” images that portend the most danger for democratic expression and national culture. Cosmopolitan Costume Design “Carnival is big business” is the saying that seems to have replaced the “all o’ we is one” that is usually uttered in moments of insecurity by

80 The New Visibilities

characters in Lovelace’s novel who marginalize themselves from the community through their pursuit of personal economic advantage but who are at the same time sensitive about being demasked. As an utterance emptied of sincerity in the novel, “all o’ we is one” may thus be considered an initial stage in the postindependence development of the national festival toward “carnival is big business.” The latter is a phrase that John Nunley, for example, employs to describe one of Peter Minshall’s earlier carnival bands. I quote Nunley’s proof of the fact at length because it so accurately captures the new industry’s impact: Peter Minshall’s 1981 band, Jungle Fever, could be taken as an example. It was produced by the Zodiac Committee, a limited liability company consisting of a restauranteur, a broadcasting producer, an accountant, an advertiser, a salesman, and a graphic artist. Shares in the company were offered as a registration fee to participants. The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce was elected as the banker, and checks made out to the production staff had to be signed by two members of the Committee. On December 6, 1980, the mas launching was held on French Street and the sale of shares was a success, allowing for immediate production. To create the twenty-five hundred costumes for the band, eight different venues were rented; fifteen seamstresses, twenty-five painters and decorators were employed; and numerous volunteers were promised free costumes. Everyone could indulge in an endless supply of pizza, chicken and chips, Chinese food, cold beer and other drinks. The King’s costume, Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright, which measured fifteen by twenty feet, glittered with 220,000 hand-stitched sequins. (1988, 108)

This scenario is a far cry from Aldrick’s almost single-handed creation of the dragon mask. Furthermore, these entrepreneurial activities place C. L. R. James’s statement that carnival represents “the diversion of energies which would normally have been spent on ordinary social work” (1992, 287) in an unexpected light. The national festival, it must be said, is also facilitated by an industry in the service of diversion. Since the rapid development of “pretty mas’” after World War II and its elaboration of fancy theme costumes (as opposed to the annually repeated figures and costumes of traditional mas’), the role of the mas’ man has been to employ his knowledge, critical insight, and creativity in order to imagine and produce artistic forms that would reveal a precise attitude toward local and international history and the contemporary world. In the face of social and political complexities like the ones that I described above, the mas’ man employs a fairly wide repertoire of

The New Visibilities 81

responses—such as parody, satire, carpe diem, and other similar or hybridized visual/rhetorical tropes—to craft engagements between masqueraders and the themes that they have chosen and paid to enact through costume design, dance, and song. Under the leadership of its mas’ men, the parade of carnival bands on Carnival Monday and Tuesday constitutes a dramatic, human exhibition of genres and information extending from an encyclopedia’s details on fauna or on pre-Columbian, European, African, or Asian history to local folklore, biblical episodes, political commentaries, current events, and sensationalistic journalism. At the same time, one’s association with a particular band is, for the most part, an open public statement about one’s allegiances, for example, to a certain neighborhood, class, sexuality, and skin color range. Because of these evolving strategies and practices of social visibility and because of the flexibility that mas’ men possess to evaluate and represent a multiplicity of internally related and unrelated themes, the hyped and legislated internationalization of the festival poses no threat to carnival per se—only to the individual and collective costumes (visual tropes) that temporarily inhabit it and make the national festival more or less recognizable, consistent, outrageous, or traditional every year. Daniel Miller claims rightly that an annually cultivated transience lies at the very heart of carnival’s ability to adapt itself to a fleeting modernity (1997, 132–33). Consequently, I will forward no argument here that the festival is moribund or retreats passively in the face of North American cultural hegemony or other such waves of externally imposed pressures; such an unqualified stance would fail to elucidate my claim that the Creole middle class is actively involved in exporting, as well as importing, cultural capital and commodities. According to Sampath, “Trinidad is one of the few developing countries to have actually transported its tourist attraction for consumption, and test-marketing, abroad” (1997, 160). In short, I am more interested in describing and interrogating some of the artistic and ideological competencies that this class currently expects of its most successful mas’ men. In a peculiarly effective alliance with the Creole middle class, some mas’ men, artists, and impresarios have played significant roles not only in the staged production of local and foreign cultures throughout the year but also, especially, in the gradual shift in carnival practices from low to high culture on the national scene. Among these mas’ men, there is one whose international successes and local though qualified heroism

82 The New Visibilities

for the middle class have placed him in a league of his own. Peter Minshall, a white Trinidadian mas’ man, professionally trained in theater design at the Central School of Art and Design in London in the 1960s, has presented his work at numerous art exhibits, installations, and theater performances in Europe, the United States, Japan, Latin America, and the Caribbean, and has launched local carnival costumes and practices in new arenas. His most celebrated international triumphs include a Guggenheim Fellowship award for Carnival Design and Kinetics (1982); costume designs, under contract with the Walt Disney Company, for the opening ceremony of the tenth Pan-American Games (Indianapolis, 1987); the appearance of his costumes at Bastille Day celebrations in Paris, as well as on French television at the invitation of Jean-Michel Jarre in 1990; and, primarily, the conceptualization, design, and direction of the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games in Barcelona (1992) and Atlanta (1996). In Trinidad and Tobago, his frequent inclusion in public discussions on carnival and his receipt of an Honorary Doctorate in Letters from the University of the West Indies at St. Augustine in 1991, as well as a national medal in recognition of service to the nation, have added institutional legitimacy to his stature. In what follows, I employ the term “competency” specifically to refer to the complex, negotiated means by which the mas’ man uses his credentials—that is, his experience, professional training, and expertise— in order to respond in varying degrees of critical and/or celebratory engagement to today’s Creole middle-class nationalism. My use of the term rejects the idea that Peter Minshall’s work is purely the result of an identifiable piece of legislation or, less directly, of middle-class cultural politics. His work and public statements about carnival are at times critical of such politics, so that his competency vis-à-vis those politics also provides room for his agency, but are highly pedagogical in tone and content. In a citizens forum that took place on March 8, 1989, for example, Minshall stated in a presentation entitled, “Where Do We Go from Here?” that “[w]e are desperately middle-class, which means that we are shallow and conservative. Everything must be nice, neat, pretty, and unthreatening, no matter how much we must lie to ourselves and to each other to make it so” (1989, 5). Through this statement, one in which he authorizes himself to speak to and on behalf of the middle class, Minshall attempts to clear a public discursive and artistic space for his admiration for and fusion of local carnival practices and the European avant-

The New Visibilities 83

garde to which he makes frequent allusion; it is not arbitrary that his critique of the middle class and its taste, like the European modernists who preceded him, should focus directly on the middle class’s collectively held hypocrisy. I will return to this speech later. Suffice it to say for the moment, however, that Minshall’s attitude toward the Creole middle class is complex for, as I shall illustrate, he both critiques and nurtures its self-image in authoritative ways. One of Minshall’s most influential contributions to local perceptions of carnival is the epistemological shift that mas’ is art, a development to which Néstor García Canclini alludes when he argues that the popular is no longer monopolized by traditional or popular sectors in the Americas (1995, 155–56). In “The Use of Traditional Figures in Carnival Art”— a speech that he gave at the First National Conference on the Performing Arts (June 25, 1985)—Minshall defines his work, stating that “Carnival Art sounds like something a vendor would sell off a card table in the street to tourists. I do not do Carnival Art. I make mas’. And mas’ is art” (1985, 9). Aldrick’s dragon mask, by contrast, was fabricated annually in the midst of an ideology of nonpossession and from scraps or, as Walcott states in his essay on carnival and mimicry that I examined in the introduction, out of “waste, of ephemera, of built-in obsolescence” (1993, 55). The categorical insistence that mas’ is art not only shifts perception of the latter from “low” (popular, naive) art to “high” (modern, self-conscious) art but also contests an atmosphere of intense, negative scrutiny by mas’ men and others when Minshall’s work was beginning to be gradually but reluctantly recognized for its radically innovative and “foreign” approaches to traditional costuming. Minshall argues that “[t]he point is not that, by a bit of theory and historical analysis, Minshall is vindicated” (1985, 20); his intention, rather, is to reiterate that carnival’s traditional figures constitute “the history of mas’” (11) and that because they are “not static in form” they possess an infinite capacity to grow and develop (14). Minshall bases these assertions for the most part on the late Daniel J. Crowley’s anthropological work on carnival costumes in Trinidad during the 1950s. And it is on the basis of this theoretical “vindication” that he extrapolates the authority for his artistic interventions. According to Minshall, the traditional carnival figure’s plasticity is commensurate with a historical tradition: “That tradition is mimicry, and the adoption and transformation of outside cultural influences, and, above all, relevance to the contemporary society” (12). In anthropologi-

84 The New Visibilities

cal discourse, this conflation of “mimicry,” adaptation, and contemporary “relevance” could be considered descriptive. From the artist’s vantage, however, the conflation readily defines a set of creative, intellectual, and artistic strategies. However, unlike the dragon mask’s mimicry in which dragons from neighboring communities were essential for the challenges that facilitated these communities’ self-affirmation, the references and subjects that Minshall boldly engages are clearly foreign and metropolitan. Because of the contemporary growth of Creole middle-class nationalism and Minshall’s competent and contentious fusion of local and international arts, relevance is perhaps his most highly contested discursive and artistic terrain, the one that often places him on the defensive. The somewhat romanticized notion of relevance in Crowley’s study underscores the naturalness with which a traditional carnival figure corresponds more or less organically to the complexities of its cultural and historical context. For Minshall, relevance requires a self-consciousness that is more in line with the artistic and interpretive activity “to make relevant.” There is a distinct parallel here between the art of making local culture internationally relevant and the redefinition of “national” in Act No. 9 of 1991. For example, he associates Danse Macabre—a collection of dark, apocalyptic costumes that he presented in the Trinidad Carnival in 1980—with the pessimism of Jimmy Carter’s “The Global 2000 Report” on hunger, disease, overpopulation, and the environment (17). Paradoxically, instead of addressing the local manifestations of the same issues, Minshall chooses to link his costumes with the former U.S. president’s report. In other similar examples, it is mas’ that is again made cosmopolitan in the wide sense of the word. In “Where Do We Go from Here?” Minshall states that mas’ had been something that he and everyone took for granted until he realized in London that mas’ was art (1989, 2). By way of evidence, he claims that “the best of our Fancy Sailors could stand comfortably beside Dalí and Magritte as profound and wonderful expressions of surrealism” (2). Minshall makes no effort, however, to define this common surrealism or elucidate the analogy further.6 In this speech, he also likens “what Trinidad had done with its mas’” to a statement that William Faulkner made in his Nobel prize acceptance speech in which the latter describes his work as having created from the human spirit something that had not existed before (2). These

The New Visibilities 85

statements illustrate Minshall’s tendency to reveal and promote the universal relevance of mas’ in terms of a metropolitan register of artistic success. At the same time, these allusions reinforce his role as the competent, native purveyor of this knowledge. Although Minshall’s competency entails introducing and adapting knowledge of the metropolitan art and literary world to a Caribbean milieu, the mas’ man also grounds cosmopolitanism in the country’s most frequently touted discourse about itself. In “The Use of Traditional Figures in Carnival Art,” Minshall ends his speech with a clarion call to nationhood and national pride in which he explains Trinidad and Tobago’s interconnectedness with the world: We are very special. We have the most extraordinary resources. By some strange design of time and space, history and geography, the races, the religions, the cultures of the world are here on this island. They belong to us all. We belong to us all. Our diversity is our originality. We are a marvellous twentieth-century hybrid. We are a callaloo. That is our strength and our destiny. That is our nationhood. Let us accept it with pride. Let us accept the responsibility and the joy that comes with the knowledge that we, through our art, can speak to the rest of the world. (1985, 24)

Minshall’s rhetorical assimilation of the cosmopolitan within national culture not only is a euphemism for Trinidad as the outcome of a colonial experiment but also allows him to reduce the threat of foreignness both from outside (mostly U.S. and British metropolitan cultural influences) and inside (his cosmopolitanism). He illustrates how the island’s ethnic and cultural diversity is concordant with recent critical interest in constructing more global and culturally inclusive definitions of modernity. Within the realm of local cultural politics, the idea that “[w]e are a marvellous twentieth-century hybrid” invokes a sense of patriotism and cultural pride in which the national community is made aware of its contemporary sophistication—that is, of its arrival, at least theoretically, on the world stage. This positioning of cosmopolitanism as the very fabric of the national community furnishes an example of what Shalini Puri refers to in her study of canonized and resistant hybridities in Trinidad’s carnival and politics of nationalism as the “slippage . . . by which cultural hybridity may not disrupt, but may actually secure, the interests of the ruling class” (1999, 14). In this scenario, Minshall’s com-

86 The New Visibilities

petence as the “native informant” of the metropolitan art world works in unison with the official promotion of Trinidad’s carnival as the “greatest show on earth.”7 Minshall’s invitation for the nation to come to a collective acknowledgment of its worldliness is intimately tied to his desire to be a mas’ man. After he realized in London that mas’ was art, he assumed a new vocation: “I wanted to give my island something of itself. My new-found understanding had banished my own self-contempt, and my mission became to share this understanding. To eliminate the self-contempt from all of us. To demonstrate that we have every reason to be secure, confident, and proud. And so, I became a mas’ man” (1989, 3). Undoubtedly, there are degrees to which the colonial, (im)migrant, exile, or refugee in the European or North American metropole is daily obliged to face and come to terms with the pressures and discomfort of his or her marginalization. Some of Frantz Fanon’s experiences in France, as I pointed out in the introduction, are a case in point. Because they enter the metropole with higher education levels than most arrivants from their own countries, Caribbean intellectuals and artists have a long and productive history of engagement with this and also subtler forms of marginalization. One need only examine, for instance, how Cuban intellectuals and artists like Lydia Cabrera, Wifredo Lam, and Alejo Carpentier and the Martinican poet, Aimé Césaire, individually attempted to distinguish and define an Afro-Caribbean identity and sensibility from their respective experiences of the Parisian avant-garde and the ways in which these experiences influenced the kinds of questions that they began to ask about their own cultural identities and roles as intellectuals and artists. In the context of Minshall’s discussion, “self-contempt” might be considered an interiorization of the ways in which the metropole marginalizes its (former) colonial subjects in the metropole and a consequence of the troubling distinctions that the “foreign” or “expatriate” artist or intellectual must now draw between strategies of masking and demasking in the former colony and those of the metropole. For Minshall there is a clearly contextualized relation between self-contempt and competency. Germane to his competency to make carnival globally relevant are the manner in which Minshall’s attempt to eliminate a personal self-contempt leads him to his vocation to be a mas’ man and, with the assumption of that role, the desire to eradicate a self-contempt

The New Visibilities 87

that he ascribes to the national community. While Aldrick’s desire to be seen beyond his dragon mask had to do with his rejection of the collective blindness that was cast on his human condition, Minshall’s notion of self-contempt and, by implication, the need to eliminate its effects on the nation seem to respond to the deidealized images that marginalization in the metropole obliges the artist and intellectual from former colonies to experience. Nevertheless, as I have already indicated, the nation as a whole does not suffer from self-contempt. Lodged somewhere between its desire to distance itself from the lower classes, upon whose cultural production it depends, and to emulate a cosmopolitan elite that invariably reminds it of its location in the third world, only the Creole middle class suffers from a discomfort about its ambivalent position that might resemble what Minshall calls self-contempt. This “self-contempt” is rooted in an internalized deidealization of Caribbean art that Minshall successfully demasks, much as the poetic voice does in Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal; however, the sentiment is far removed from Fanon’s rejection of metropolitan practices of deidealization. For Minshall, the personal journey from self-contempt to pride is one that began in a profound moment of revelation focused, for the most part, on introspection. Upon the acceptance of his honorary doctorate in 1991, Minshall recalls the circumstances surrounding an event that led him, as he now narrates it, to his vocation as a mas’ man. Once again, the fusion of metropolitan and carnival art styles comes to the fore in his description. Minshall remembers that when his mother requested a costume for his adopted sister in 1974, he was at first confounded: “Me, professional designer in avant-garde London, designing a child’s carnival costume in Trinidad? Worse again, she wanted it to be a hummingbird! A hummingbird?” (1991, 6).8 Eventually, when the costume took to the stage, the public reception of its beauty and performance was overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Explaining this triumph, Minshall reminisces about the accomplishment in the following manner: What had happened? A communication between a performance and an audience that was complete, profound, and transcendent. Something that the best paintings, the best sculpture, the best dance, the best theater rarely achieve. And there, amidst the dust and clatter of the Queen’s Park Savannah, in a little island called Trinidad, an exhausted, exhilarated Peter Minshall thrust his hand up into the air and shouted to the heavens: “Picasso—Beat that!” If there was ever a moment of revelation in my

88 The New Visibilities

life, it was then. I had discovered something. I had not set out to discover it. A truth revealed itself to me . . . to us . . . to our little family of the mas’. It became our duty to share that truth. (7)

In this aesthetic negotiation of metropolitan performance art and local carnival art, spontaneous public appreciation provides tangible proof of an accomplishment in which the fusion of art forms appears seamless and the troublesome issue of the costume’s relevance to local culture and events becomes moot. At the same time, what can hardly be ignored in this narrative about an ideal rapport between the audience and the cooperative labor of the costume designer and the performer is Minshall’s recourse to a language of transcendence. Also noteworthy are the references that he makes to himself in the third person. Because his notion of transcendence serves as an antidote to personal and collective “self-contempt,” as well as a means of resolving questions of cultural (ir)relevance, Minshall’s recollection of a foundational transcendence in the presentation and performance of a carnival costume merits critical attention. In James’s suggestion that some form of sublimation is at work in carnival’s “diversion of energies” from ordinary social work, he goes on to associate that sublimation with islands like Trinidad, “which are westernised without any nationalisation of their own.” For Stallybrass and White, sublimation is “a process of upward displacement through the social stratification of discourse” and is “inseparable from strategies of cultural domination” (1986, 197). In “Where Do We Go from Here?” and in his honorary doctorate acceptance speech, Minshall seeks to transcend “self-contempt” by attaining artistic successes at the level of the West’s most eminent artistic geniuses. And it is on the basis of this urge to transcend the local, at the same time that the local provides artistic inspiration, that Minshall appeals to a nationalist spirit in his audiences. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon critiques the native intellectual who performs cultural work that corroborates the agendas of national political parties. He writes that this intellectual often assumes an attitude that takes on aspects of a cult or religion.9 For Fanon, this attitude “is symptomatic of the intellectual’s realization of the danger that he is running in cutting his last moorings and of breaking adrift from his people” (1968, 217). Although Fanon wrote this book during a period of rapid European decolonization, his warnings against the “pit-

The New Visibilities 89

falls of national consciousness” still ring true when he adds that this kind of native intellectual “must seek his culture elsewhere, anywhere at all; and if he fails to find the substance of culture of the same grandeur and scope as displayed by the ruling power, the native intellectual will very often fall back upon emotional attitudes and will develop a psychology which is dominated by exceptional sensitivity and susceptibility” (220). Fanon also argues that that intellectual typically goes through three phases: a “period of unqualified assimilation”; a reinterpretation of old legends “in the light of a borrowed estheticism and of a conception of the world which was discovered under other skies”; and finally, “he turns himself into an awakener of the people” (222–23). From the perspective of Fanon’s findings, Minshall’s stated vocation to share the truth that revealed itself to him with the nation suggests that the mas’ man has already attained this final stage. Winin’ in the Street In his conclusion that respectability would have to be undermined and its foreign referents and racial base removed in order to eradicate the cultural aftermath of colonial domination, Peter J. Wilson coincidentally mentions that men and women should move toward sharing a common set of values. Wilson makes no effort to theorize the consequences of advocating the elimination of respectability and simultaneously locating that “colonial” practice in women’s domestic spaces (also see Sampath 1997, 164–65). Wilson’s suggestion, with regard to respectability, that “[w]ith the demise of colonial society, the primary support of the class system has been removed and the egalitarian system now has the opportunity to emerge into social self-consciousness and social dominance” (1973, 235) sounds rather naive when we consider the complex nature of postindependence and neocolonial cultural politics today. For Jacqui M. Alexander, what does not disappear after independence is the fact that “the very identity and authority of the colonial project rested upon the racialization and sexualization of morality” (1991, 133). Hence, it is essential to investigate the perceived ways in which women’s subscriptions to respectability—how they want to be seen in public versus how others want to see them—bear on current definitions of public space during carnival. I am particularly interested in describing and examining some of the language that has been used to reconcile women’s “street behavior” and the middle-classization of the national festival.

90 The New Visibilities

Respectability is still a powerful driving force in the middle class’s desire for upward mobility in postindependence Trinidad and Tobago. At the same time, it has been noted that women have taken to celebrating in the streets at carnival time as no generation of women did before them. There has been a great deal of public and intellectual speculation about this increase in women’s participation in carnival during the last twenty-five years. According to Koningsbruggen, “[m]en were over-represented in the bands until the mid-1950’s, but that situation changed drastically. In 1983, 1700 of the 1900 members of Harold Saldenah’s masquerade band were women, and Irwin McWilliams’ presentation included only 200 men against no less than 1200 women” (1997, 80). This subject of increased women’s participation so frequently drifts into a discussion of winin’ in public discourse that it is difficult to separate both issues. (After all, not all women wine at carnival time, nor are all winers women.) Winin’, winding or gyrating and thrusting the pelvis in time to music, was originally associated with the jamet crowd. Socioeconomically far removed from this crowd in colonial society, however, were the upperclass French Creole families who celebrated carnival, roped off and elevated on horse-driven carts and later on trucks, where their contact with the rest of the celebrating population was minimal. “Middle-class women did not begin to take part until the 1930’s,” writes Koningsbruggen, “and when they did so they were heavily chaperoned” (102). To associate, therefore, the record number of women in the streets at carnival time with this form of dancing (and, implicitly, with its history) invites an examination of what appears to be a radical displacement of women from the domestic space to a certain kind of exhibitionism in the street. Moreover, the perennial journalistic attention to winin’ suggests that a debate about the definition, celebration, and/or eradication of something “national” is also taking place. The debate about winin’ in Trinidad and Tobago today offers evidence of class-informed attempts at (re)defining a national cultural identity according to the middle class’s own internal debate about reputation and respectability. Recent investigators suggest that the dramatic increase of women in carnival signals important transformations in public space and, by extension, in the nation’s social fabric as a whole. Burton, for example, argues that even though Wilson’s gendered categories have proven increasingly untenable, it is still certain that women are marginalized in “the culture of play and performance” that was the object of his study

The New Visibilities 91

(1997, 267). Nevertheless, Burton goes on to state, “there are indisputable signs that that marginality is at least beginning to end: in the ‘winers’ of Jamaica and Trinidad who have moved into public places hitherto monopolized by the performance culture of men” (267). Burton welcomes the end of women’s marginality in public spaces proffering, with some reserve, that it has brought about “talk of a crisis of male identity” and, more significant, that men and women should create a new synthesis combining “the best of the culture of respectability with the best of the culture of reputation” (267). This utopianism is reminiscent of Wilson’s in that it fails to explore the local consequences of this “desirable” shift in any meaningful way. In any case, how advisable is it to base the notion of an end to women’s marginality on the fact that winers are more evident in the street at a particular time of the year? Anthropologist Daniel Miller has studied winin’ in greater detail both during and outside carnival. He notes, for instance, that women gradually monopolize the dance floor the closer it gets to carnival (1997, 119), a change, he intimates, that has to do with the gender distinctions that arise by the choice of music at a fête (party) (124).10 Basing his interpretation on field observation, interviews, and mass media coverage, Miller claims that while winin’ looks erotic, it is not necessarily so since gradations of eroticism exist, and venues where winin’ takes place vary considerably (114). For the most part, Miller draws his conclusion that the dance is not erotic from statements made by the group of low-income women that he interviewed, as well as by some intellectuals in the press. By contrast, he states, “[m]uch more common among male conversation was the idea that Carnival has revealed an enormous growth in ‘zammees’ (lesbians), an idea met by my own female informants with incredulity” (115).11 A crucial issue with respect to winin’, therefore, is to explain women’s erotic dancing in the street with such a scarcity or in the absence of men. Later in his discussion, Miller suggests that “[t]he clue to the interpretation of winin’ at Carnival may lie in the most common interpretation made by men, which is that it is lesbianism gone rife” (123). Faced at this point with his female informants’ “complete incomprehension” vis-à-vis this interpretation, Miller indulges in an activity that hardly qualifies as field observation because of its entirely staged nature: “they [his female informants] insisted on holding some ‘women only’ parties in which they could ‘get on bad,’ or ‘free up,’ outside the presence of other men, in order to show me what it was like.

92 The New Visibilities

While dancing they continually parodied the manner in which males respond to their assumed sexual indiscretions. For example, one might roughly pull a friend from her wining partner with feigned anger” (123). According to Miller’s reasoning, this scenario is supposed to contain the clue to interpreting winin’ at carnival. Yet his methods for finding that clue are questionable. What does this scene of women imitating heterosexual male conduct reveal to him? Miller does not explore the connection between parodying and agency any further. In any case, what is lacking in his analysis is a theorization of the dance floor at fêtes and the streets at carnival time as attempts at the creation of transient, homosocial spaces in which a variety of female subjectivities and sexualities could exist and emerge in public. In believing his informants and, more specifically, in being taken in by their respective performances of male and female heterosexual panic, Miller concludes, after witnessing his informants’ “women only” party, that in carnival “[w]hat is then enacted is essentially a sexuality which does not require men; it is not lesbianism but autosexuality” (123). Miller further explains “autosexuality,” stating that “the object of wining is in most cases really [women] themselves. It is an expression of a free sexuality which has no object but itself, and most especially it is a sexuality not dependent upon men” (123).12 Had Miller thought of winin’ as an activity that expressed continuums of sexual, racial, and class identity formations, he would not have coined so unfortunate a term to describe this form of women’s performance. Clearly, he arrives at “autosexuality” because pressures external to his methods oblige him to overstate his case. In this light, desexualization is a more “comforting” prospect than the fact that there are also lesbians winin’ in the street. Miller arrives at his essentializing conclusion about women and winin’ without a broad enough picture of which women wine and under what circumstances. Even though he admits that his data about winin’ comes from low-income female informants (115), he indicates that this data is still somewhat valid for women of higher income groups (116). Yet it would seem that in order to gain a more complex understanding of the dance form and performance, some focus on higher-income women would be necessary, especially since, as he himself notes, “[t]he newspapers tended to concentrate on the upper-class women in costume, who were most evident to the television cameras and who are not associated with wining outside of Carnival itself ” (115). Because I am focusing on

The New Visibilities 93

perceptions about the relationship between women and respectability, this information about the ways in which women’s participation and winin’ get conflated in the press and mass media is crucial. In contrast with Miller’s work, Koningsbruggen’s analysis is illuminating not only because it has more to say about class differentiation but also because he associates that differentiation with its effects on costume aesthetics and public space at carnival time. Costumes can be costly. Koningsbruggen claims first that women are enjoying higher incomes, which results in their ability to make independent decisions about how and with whom they enjoy themselves during the festival (1997, 80); he concludes, however, that this reason cannot fully explain “the revolutionary reversal of the sex ratio” (81). What he proposes, then, is that women’s higher income expenditure has promoted a greater tendency for mas’ men to cater to women by concentrating on “pretty mas’” (81)—the very style of nontraditional, fantasy masquerading that replaced Aldrick’s dragon costume in The Dragon Can’t Dance.13 It is not coincidental that Aldrick associates the creation of the dragon mask and his performance with “a sense of miracle and manness and faith” (Lovelace 1979, 41; emphasis added). Moreover, Koningsbruggen argues that this feminization of costume styles is responsible, since “[m]en do not seem to have a reply to the challenging women’s manifestations,” for the withdrawal of men “to the virile bastions of calypso and steelband—although here too the number of women is on the increase” (1997, 81). Based on this approach, in which he illustrates that the increase in women is more generalized than the narrow conflation of their increased participation and their winin’, Koningsbruggen then questions Miller’s term “autosexuality” and the latter’s findings on the subject: “Does Miller mean that the numerical preponderance of women is to be explained by the fact that women’s wining act excludes men so that they stay away? On the other hand, if men pull out of the masquerade for many other reasons as well or instead, we can just as easily draw the commonsense conclusion that women have to make do with other women once the men have left” (83). What Koningsbruggen illustrates here is the way in which Miller’s essentialism leads him into the “chickenor-egg conundrum” (83). In rejecting Miller’s term, Koningsbruggen promotes another reading of the “women only” party that the former witnessed. He argues that the winin’ display is not about a rejection of sexuality (85) but about a profound parody of it. Koningsbruggen argues

94 The New Visibilities

this point based on an aspect of winin’ that cameras frequently fail to capture or pursue. He cites local journalist B. C. Pires, who observes that women purposefully wine grim-faced and ecstatically in front of the camera and then spin away laughing afterward (84). Most commentators, Pires reports, focus on the indecency of the act but fail to notice the laughter. Koningsbruggen concludes from this that winin’ parodies phallocentrism: “[w]omen do not want to copy the macho showing off of men; they want to provoke, to poke fun. It is a direct mockery of the phallus” (85). As credible as this argument is, it is still only a partial explanation of this public parody. If winin’ practices in front of cameras parody the phallocentrism that may be observed during the rest of the year, then these women have not really crossed the threshold into the male-dominated street as much as or in the way that many observers think. Rather, if the “revolutionary reversal of the sex ratio” is any indication, it means that, instead of disappearing or even waning, the practices of respectability—self-imposed or not—are more hegemonic than ever. At this point, it would be useful to take a look at discussions about some similar practices in other islands. In her analysis of women and dancehall in Jamaica, Carolyn Cooper writes that “[t]hough the denigration of ‘slackness’ seems to determine the concomitant denigration of female sexuality, this feminisation of slackness in the dancehall can also be read in a radically different way as an innocently transgressive celebration of freedom from sin and law. Liberated from the repressive respectability of a conservative gender ideology of female property and propriety, these women lay proper claim to the control of their own bodies” (1995, 11). “Slackness,” as is the case with jamette behavior in winin’ performances in Trinidad and Tobago, refers to the appearance of sexual looseness in women’s dancehall performance. For Cooper, however, slackness is also a more widespread and socially significant countercultural practice, and it is for this reason that she takes care to distinguish between female sexuality and women’s agency in the “feminisation of slackness.” In her study of carnival in Santiago de Cuba, Judith Bettelheim begins her explanation of similar phenomena among “the sexy lady, the Tropicana dancer, the bumping and grinding dancers on Carnaval floats” by admitting her initial critical discomfort and cultural outsideness (1994, 193). However, like Cooper, she concludes that “rather than assuming the role of victim, some African and African American women have asserted their sexuality in performance as an oppositional

The New Visibilities 95

practice” (196). Both critics view such public dancing and behavior as politicized performances, since the women that they describe assert an agency in spite of or as a challenge to a heterosexual male gaze that is generally associated with the laws and authority of a patriarchal order. What needs to be explored further in the context of carnival in Trinidad and Tobago, however, is the extent to which winin’ in front of cameras not only parodies the deeply embedded pressures of competitive middle-classization in domestic spaces but also simultaneously inscribes (photographs) middle- and upper-class women in the street at carnival time as well. In other words, this parody cannot be separated from displayed expressions of class identity and, hence, of strategies to increase visibility in the street. Inadvertently or not, the overwhelming photographic and journalistic emphasis on women as “natural” winers has succeeded in camouflaging class issues such as the privatization of public performances during carnival when the affordability of costumes determines membership in showpiece bands. Mimicry is not the property of the oppressed. A brief allusion to upper-class carnival practices on another island in the past might serve to elucidate this strategy further. In her research on the last days of French colonialism in Saint Domingue, Dayan reports that Creole whites took on masks as purposefully as blacks did (1995, 178), and that colonial historians attempted to establish distinctions between “those whites who adopt black style and the blacks who imitate white behavior” when in fact “many similarities abound” (175). In Trinidad’s carnival, one of the oldest (though now extinct) masquerades was the neg jade (yard negro), a form of costuming through which members of the white French Creole plantocracy imitated their yard slaves (see Crowley 1988b). It stands to reason, therefore, that the photographed winin’ of middleand upper-class women today is an imitation of jamet behavior from a position of political and socioeconomic power in which degrees of social privilege accrue from being seen to imitate a group against which these women meticulously define themselves during the rest of the year. This, on the one hand, is an example of Lacanian mimicry in which being “inscribed in the picture” is facilitated by the invisible or camouflaged trappings of a carnival industry. On the other hand, this carnival is far removed from the lower-frequency politics that I have described elsewhere. In fact, the ideology of middle-classization that informs the NCC’s cultural politics is so promoted as a discourse of one harmo-

96 The New Visibilities

nious national celebration (“all o’ we is one”) that this ideology is consistently rendered “invisible.” Burton reveals the effects of this ideology and politics on public space when he writes that the more significant celebrations are allegedly abandoning the street in favor of theaters, tents, and ballrooms, leaving the street a site where the population at large—or that (diminishing?) proportion of it that still bothers to attend—watch others reveling rather than revel themselves. In short, as carnival mutates from a popular national festivity into an international post-modern extravaganza, the active masquerader of old is giving way to the passive spectator-consumer of today. Carnival has been exoticized and commodified for foreign consumption, and Trinidadians allegedly confront it as tourists in their own land, estranged from the very festivity that is supposed to embody the quintessence of what it is to be Trinidadian or even what it is to be West Indian, or black. (1997, 208)

Burton is correct in arguing that the national festival has been commodified for foreign consumption. But it is essential to point out that the consumption is also meant for locals. The spectacle of light-skinned middle- and upper-class women winin’ in the street is a display of power that seems to have transfixed commentators in their efforts to explain this phenomenon in a nation where the vast majority of inhabitants are of African and East Indian heritage. This photographic fascination is prevalent even though, as Sampath states with reference to recent transformations in the national festival, “sufficient money can buy a ticket into any carnival band or fête,” and “racial boundaries in carnival have given way to economic ones” (1997, 158). This fascination, in short, returns to the issue of the Creole middle class’s ambivalent position between the white and light-skinned upper classes and the mostly black and brown lower classes. Barbara Powrie’s observations around 1956 that the “ideal person and form of behaviour is still ‘white’ and life is patterned [for the colored middle class] to conform as closely as possible to all that is felt to be contained within this ideal” (1988, 94) are still valid in today’s photographic fascination with a particular minority of winin’ women. As part of the carnival industry that is increasingly being streamlined for local and foreign consumption, music has a vital role to play in facilitating the kinds of dancing that get covered by the press. For example, it is by no means arbitrary that in a postindependence period— when the dragon can no longer dance, as it were—that the majority of

The New Visibilities 97

the calypso and soca songs at carnival time urge dancers to conduct themselves in certain ways. Miller reports, for instance, that [t]he dance calypsos constantly refer to states of dance. Phrases such as “jump up,” “misbehave,” “getting on bad” or just “get on,” “feeling the feeling,” “wine down the place,” “bump and grind” punctuate all such songs, and the singer will exhort the crowd that “we all come here to get on bad.” The very success of the music is seen in terms of the degree to which it leads the crowd into precisely such activities. (1997, 120)

In other words, most of these songs not only furnish a particular mood but also to a great extent orchestrate the crowd’s dancing activities. Why, then, is there a generalized tendency among songwriters to assume that revelers require instructions about how to enjoy themselves?14 A significant part of the reason lies in the degree to which these soca songwriters and performers contribute to spectacles in which the national festival is commodified. The sight of middle- and upper-class women winin’ in the street, therefore, parodies phallocentrism and its relation to practices of respectability. But it must also be noted that the socioeconomic wherewithal of these women of various classes to perform and feign marginality in a staged spectacle for national consumption is an exercise in power. I am reminded here of Dayan’s observation that when French white women adopted “the ‘immoral’ dress and carriage of mulatto women” as they competed with the latter for the attention of their Frenchmen during the final days of the colony, the white women were in fact transgressing a 1779 statute that had been brought into existence in order to regulate what colored people could wear (1995, 179–80). It is necessary to recall something of carnival’s past practices among the French Creole elite in Trinidad to be able to discern the sophistication with which commercial power possesses and deploys what Goldberg calls “technologies productive of invisibility” (1996, 191). When the French Creole families celebrated carnival, as I indicated earlier, they did so elevated above the crowd on carts or trucks that were cordoned off from the rest of the revelers. Today no such visible cord or rope exists between these photographed women and others who celebrate carnival in the streets. Band membership, as I also indicated earlier, is frequently determined by class, racial, and neighborhood allegiances, so that a boundary is implicitly kept in place. Even more materially tangible than this common practice, however, are the numerous security personnel—“camouflaged”

98 The New Visibilities

in brightly colored T-shirts advertising the bands that can afford to employ them—whose foremost responsibility involves ensuring the physical safety of band members. It is certain that more women have taken to the streets at carnival time than ever before. But it is also true that these street celebrations have become more privatized and less public than they have ever been in postindependence history. In his critique of the pitfalls of national consciousness, Fanon argues that the national middle class’s role in history is that of intermediary (1968, 152). “Its mission,” he writes, “has nothing to do with transforming the nation; it consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged, which today puts on the mask of neo-colonialism” (152). This critique still rings true today. My analyses of Minshall’s personal projection and transcendence of Creole middle-class “self-contempt” in the first part of the chapter and of this class’s fascination with winin’ middle- and upperclass women in the second section reveal the extent to which national energies in the form of organizations such as the NCC are being spent on fabricating and commodifying the “right” visibilities for local consumption and foreign investment. As I draw these conclusions at the end of this section, the situation in which I find myself is quite ironic: it is peculiar to be writing about dancing, masquerading, and having a good time with such weighty seriousness. But there exists a deeper and more troubling seriousness than the one that I have assumed in this chapter in particular—and that is the official espousing and staging of an ideology of national unity at the same time that the privatization of public space is given free rein. Hence, the economics of participation in carnival is currently the favored form of crowd control. “Cynical reason is no longer naive,” Zˇiˇzek writes, “but is a paradox of an enlightened false consciousness: one knows the falsehood very well, one is well aware of a particular interest hidden behind an ideological universality, but still one does not renounce it” (1989, 29– 30). Hence, in spite of the Caribbean’s acquisition of varied forms of political autonomy, it still remains crucial to remove the ideological mask of cynical reason from those nation builders who stage national unity in order to pursue their own private interests.

Part II Masking through Language

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER THREE Specularity and the Language of Corpulence Estrella’s Body in Cabrera Infante’s Tres tristes tigres

What is to be suggested in an emphatic way is that choteo does not take seriously anything of that which is generally considered serious. . . . To take seriously is the equivalent, in fact, of conducting oneself respectfully toward something. Because “respect,” as we know, does not mean esteem. The same Latin etymology (re-spicere: to look again) reveals the exact meaning of the word, which is that of close consideration, of circumspection. —jorge mañach, Indagación del choteo There is nothing we can consciously do to prevent certain projections from occurring over and over again, in an almost mechanical manner, when we look at certain racially, sexually, and economically marked bodies. That does not, in and of itself, signify the failure of the ethical. The ethical becomes operative not at the moment when unconscious desires and phobias assume possession of our look, but in a subsequent manner, when we take stock of what we have just “seen,” and attempt—with an inevitably limited self-knowledge— to look again, differently. —kaja silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World

A distinctive feature that separates the Spanish-speaking Caribbean’s constructions of national and regional cultural identities from those of the rest of the Caribbean is the access that Hispanophone artists, intellectuals, and politicians enjoy to two principal and competing discourses about their culture(s). Prevalent in modified forms throughout Spanish America today, the first discourse has been an institutionally privileged 101

102 Specularity and the Language of Corpulence

one that emerged over a hundred and fifty years ago as national and supranational attempts at criollo self-definition.1 This discourse informs the term raza and the narratives that have contributed to the latter’s amply debated meanings. José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel (1900) offers perhaps the most detailed description of the projection and limits of this discourse. Although it originally posited and promoted a cultural homogeneity based to a large extent on a French nineteenth-century model of absolute commensurability based on a spoken national language, geopolitical rationality, and, thus, national identity, this pan-Hispanic discourse did not elaborate a specific racial type. Or at least, the use of the term raza in Spanish America (especially during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and dramatically after the Spanish-American War of 1898) to define a regional modernity that would successfully compete against the challenges of an Anglo-American commercial and cultural hegemony precluded the political complications that the elaboration of racial specificities might have prompted. In other words, because its advocates geared its political and cultural work toward the creation of a national and geopolitical consensus in the face of external “enemies,” the discourse on raza did not conceptualize or specify internal ethnological distinctions such as those to be found in contemporary interrogations of the terms “ethnicity,” “creolization,” and “hybridity.” It was not until the twentieth century that American taxonomies of hybridity like that developed by José Vasconcelos in La raza cósmica were intentionally and widely theorized at a national and regional level, and even then they were touted as new universals analogous in their ideologically manipulative functions to the discourse on raza. The 1920s and 1930s marked the emergence of the second discourse on national and regional cultural identities in the Hispanic Caribbean. This discourse did not originate in the humanities in Spanish-speaking America, where the discourse on raza was still firmly embedded, but arrived through the relatively new social sciences of ethnology and cultural anthropology, as well as from the quest for innocence in native others by certain members of the European and Latin American avant-gardes. At the same time, the work of colonial administrators, travel writers, and especially European scholars such as Maurice Delafosse, Leo Frobenius, and others introduced the study of African history and civilizations to a range of disciplines and arts in Europe and Latin America.2 It was in part because of the European modernist artists’ engagement with

Specularity and the Language of Corpulence 103

these documents and studies that Hispanophone intellectuals and artists began to register a more profound interest in their own Afro-Caribbean cultures. The first instigator of this epistemological shift in Hispanic Caribbean letters was the white, criollo, Puerto Rican poet Luis Palés Matos, who is credited with having launched the literary movement called negrismo through his book of poems Tuntún y pasa de grifería (1937).3 But it has been the larger contingent of Cuban writers, artists, and intellectuals, Fernando Ortiz, Lydia Cabrera, Nicolás Guillén, Wifredo Lam, and Alejo Carpentier—to name its most prominent members— that has been most responsible for elaborating this discourse in SpanishAmerican letters and beyond. While the realization of this epistemological shift in Cuban letters and arts was carried out during the first half of the twentieth century by these luminaries, few so radically politicized Cuba’s ethnic self-awareness as that country’s first generation of postrevolutionary theoreticians and artists. In the fervor of 1959, for example, Che Guevara urged the university to make itself accessible to the new Cuba by painting itself black, mulatto, worker, and peasant.4 Yet today, socialist Cuba’s commitment to discussing and refining its position on Afro-Cubans and their location in its definitions of nationhood and culture remains subject to debate both inside and outside the country. Under these polemical circumstances, it is no surprise that this second discourse that I have been describing possesses no fixed nomenclature. Apart from the term negrismo, adjectives like afrocubano, afroantillano, and others allude to its circulation as one coordinate among several of the discursive construction of the Hispanic Caribbean nation. More often than not, this discourse is mostly relegated to costumbrista notions of a premodern, telluric folklore or to urban popular culture. This chapter implicitly addresses this problem of nomenclature in the case of Cuba. The distinction that I have drawn between the discourses on raza and Afro-Cubanness is heuristic. The choice of one discourse over the other is neither arbitrary nor reducible to the possibility of completely separating one from the other. In her study of negritud and nation in Puerto Rico, Catherine Den Tandt argues that in the Hispanic Caribbean “difference and erasure have most often been played out among the categories of blackness and Hispanism” (1999, 78). Clearly, literary and intellectual attention to Afro-Cubanness is frequently proffered as a counterdiscourse to pan-Hispanism’s “universal” history of the region and its national variants, as well as, in the twentieth century, to U.S.

104 Specularity and the Language of Corpulence

influence in the region. For example, just before Nicolás Guillén published Motivos de son (1930), the first in a series of important poetry collections on Afro-Cuban speech, music, performance, and social life, he wrote articles such as “El camino de Harlem” and others attacking racist practices in Cuba for their fundamentally antipatriotic spirit and the inability of their practitioners to imagine a more diverse and equitable national identity.5 At the same time, and predating the poetic voice’s “inner revolution” in Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, Guillén also criticizes Cuban blacks for adopting negative, classist attitudes toward African contributions to their Cubanness. In an article published on January 26, 1930, about the local Afro-Cuban composer and performer of the son musical tradition, Rosendo Ruiz, Guillén asserts: The Cuban black—to constrain our thought even more—lives on the margins of his own beauty. Whenever he has someone to hear him, he abominates the son, which today has so much of the black in it; he denigrates the rumba, in whose warm rhythm the African noontime sun yawns, and he closes his eyes, so that a flash of comprehension may not be discerned there, in front of the profound demands of the bongó drum, with its deep grandfather voice. (1975, 12; my translation)

Yet the mutual and inevitable “contamination” of the discourses that I described earlier can also be perceived as early as the first stirrings of the Cuban novel in the 1830s. In recognition of the black peril (el peligro negro)—that is, the threat of a general slave uprising inspired by Haiti’s at the beginning of the nineteenth century—reformist intellectuals from the patrician class like Domingo Del Monte advocated both the gradual abolition of slavery and the introduction of white immigrants to the island.6 The foundational literature that they produced attests to a crucial realization about the political necessity of incorporating blacks into Cuban nationhood.7 The purpose of this chapter is to describe and examine the representation of a contemporary attempt at imagining a cultural location for a particular Afro-Cuban figure in prerevolutionary Havana. What sort of (in)visibility does this figure enjoy? The character in question is that of Estrella or, as she calls herself, “La Estrella” [the Star]—an apparently obese bolero singer who appears in sections entitled “Ella cantaba boleros” [She used to sing boleros] in Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s novel Tres tristes tigres (1964–1967). When Códac, the protagonist/narrator, encounters the bolero singer for the first time, he describes her body relent-

Specularity and the Language of Corpulence 105

lessly, employing a series of hyperbolic images. His focus on her corpulence inspires humor that separates readers according to an appreciation or distaste for the ways in which we are invited to imagine the singer: the description obliges us to laugh, repress that laughter, or take offense vis-à-vis the narrator’s sensibility. In fact, on separate though strikingly comparable occasions, I witnessed how the initial description of Estrella’s body created two opposing groups of mostly female, Hispanic readers in my undergraduate classroom. Some students considered the narrator’s description racist and misogynist. Yet the same depiction also provoked peals of laughter from another group. When these students were asked to explain their reaction, they insisted that the description was not insulting and that to understand why they laughed one would have to be from the Caribbean. There are various terms in the islands for the combined contemplation and word play that humorously and initially invoke Estrella’s body in this novel. In Cuba, it is known as choteo, and Cabrera Infante refers to this practice as “una de las esencias cubanas” [one of the Cuban essences] (Pereda 1979, 106).8 In this chapter, I want to show first how choteo is employed to invoke Estrella’s corpulence and make her visible in a particular way. Códac, the protagonist/narrator of this section of the novel, masks his compatriot’s body in hyperbole, so that the analysis that follows does not concentrate as much on Estrella’s self-assertion through masking—her selfinscription in the picture in Lacanian terms—as on the ways in which Códac’s linguistic skills produce a “comical” though deformative overdetermination of the bolero singer’s size, a humorous but in the end deidealizing reflection of her body. Códac is a cultural “insider” who invokes the bolero singer’s presence through effusive language in order to maintain a certain distance from her. This distancing represents the inverse of Césaire’s sober depiction of his fellow passenger because Códac makes no attempt to come to terms with his own strategies of exclusion as he contemplates the bolero singer. As the reader’s narrative instrument of sight or “camera,” Códac may be considered what Silverman calls “an eye which has been rendered socially productive” (1996, 130). His eye, however, is not relentlessly reducible to choteo’s conflations of insult and humor. Rather, Códac gradually meanders from celebration to violence in the course of “Ella cantaba boleros.” Second, I interrogate how the protagonist/narrator radically undermines the strategies of “visibility” that he imposes through choteo and subsequently participates in

106 Specularity and the Language of Corpulence

a visual violence that emerges with the technologies of a culture industry’s demand for static, exportable icons of national culture. Códac’s initial fascination with Estrella is finally abandoned in favor of a collective opportunism to see an aspect of Cuban culture rendered materially representable and bandied like a flag. (It is by no means arbitrary that the diva’s name, among other signifiers, also alludes to the star on the Cuban flag.) But the conclusion, in and of itself, that the narrator eventually becomes opportunistic or represents the first stage of that opportunism is not the only politically urgent object of inquiry in this study. By choosing to examine the ways in which the diva’s body is represented in and through a language of popular culture, I afford myself the opportunity to investigate certain “transgressions,” “impieties,” and instances of “political incorrectness” that would not normally be available within the two discourses that I outlined at the start of this chapter. Cabrera Infante has stated that the novel is an almost five-hundredpage joke (cited in Pereda 1979, 104). And it is perhaps his heightened sense of irreverence for respectability that obliges some critics, like Eliana Rivero, for instance, to state that that joke often descends into insensitivity, bad taste, and a reimposition of all sorts of sexual and class oppressions (1982, 287). However, rather than denounce the text wholesale for its improprieties, I prefer to illustrate how these transgressions challenge forms of critical spectatorship (like the thoughts that Códac keeps to himself and to which readers are privy) by revealing and interrogating some of the frontiers between respectability and disrespect that are seldom brought into profound discussion in the novel’s criticism. Furthermore, by scrutinizing how the bolero singer’s body functions as shifting, socially constructed, and racialized configurations of cultural identity within a visual field, it becomes possible, as Silverman states in the epigraph above, to “look again, differently.” However, because I also want to show how Cabrera Infante’s text defensively posits popular culture as ultimately ungraspable, I would like to highlight some information about the novel’s origin. The idea for Tres tristes tigres occurred to Cabrera Infante around 1961 as the result of a furious controversy among postrevolutionary intellectuals, some of whom denounced the short documentary PM—made by his brother Saba Cabrera and Orlando Jiménez Leal—because its rough, “underground” footage about a black bolero singer and Havana’s nightlife was deemed too decadent and thus too counterrevolutionary for Cuban socialism’s

Specularity and the Language of Corpulence 107

cultural goals (see Gallagher 1974, 51–52, and Padilla 1990, 51–54).9 Cabrera Infante had taken up a defense of the documentary in Lunes de Revolución, where he was editor and which was subsequently closed due to the controversy. Another contributing factor was the death of the singer Fredy in Puerto Rico in 1961 (Souza 1996, 76). In this sense, the novel’s implicit critique of the regime’s militaristic approach to culture recalls in a familiar way some of the conditions under which Bakhtin’s work on the carnivalesque and grotesque realism in Rabelais and His World contested the restraints placed on writing in the Soviet Union during the 1930s by the advocates of socialist realism under Stalin. Read clandestinely during the first years of the Cuban Revolution, Tres tristes tigres provides an enormous compendium of popular cultural subjectivities and practices. Its vast and dynamic array of characters, interspersed and serialized events, public and private spaces and spectacles, linguistic registers, invocations of diverse styles, parodies, puzzles, and jokes make the attempt to conceptualize the novel as a whole a formidable if not impossible critical task. In a 1970 interview with Rita Guibert, Cabrera Infante called his novel the most apolitical book in the history of Latin American literature because it was the most liberated, and that it was this liberty that most troubled totalitarian regimes (1974, 30). Its neo-Baroque allegorization of Havana’s prerevolutionary nightlife attaches an additional layer of complexity to an already sumptuous, nostalgic theater of the spoken word.10 Nevertheless, in the midst of this cacophony of narrated and narrating voices, “Ella cantaba boleros” secures pride of place. In 1996, Cabrera Infante published this series of interspersed narratives within the novel independently. He states in the republication’s prologue that “Ella cantaba boleros” had been the novel’s “hilo conductor” [narrative thread] and that it had taken him some thirty years to follow advice that Mario Vargas Llosa had given him to publish the section separately (1996, 7). This republication also contains Metafinal—the reworking of and alternative to the original conclusion’s description of Estrella’s peculiar death and burial. Show and Tell Códac inhabits a nocturnal world. He is a photographer by trade and a frequent visitor of cabarets, nightclubs, and that institution known as the chowcito, or group of stragglers who refuse to recognize the light of day. Late one night, he ambles into the Las Vegas nightclub and is greeted

108 Specularity and the Language of Corpulence

by Vítor Perla, a shady acquaintance with whom he chats for a while. Later, the Spaniard introduces him to Irena (or Irenita, as Códac calls her), a miniaturized local version of Marilyn Monroe, with whom he eventually and casually begins to make love in the dark. After having made their intentions known to each other, they prepare to leave. Suddenly, Códac catches sight of Estrella and is transfixed: “Era una mulata enorme, gorda gorda, de brazos como muslos y de muslos que parecían dos troncos sosteniendo el tanque del agua que era su cuerpo” [She was an enormous brown-skinned woman, fat fat, with arms like thighs and thighs that looked like two tree trunks holding up the water tank that was her body] (1994, 66). Focusing in this hyperbolic manner on her corpulence, a practice that he repeats incessantly throughout “Ella cantaba boleros,” this glance further stimulates a flurry of words and images in Códac’s mind: Well the fat woman was right there in the middle of the chowcito dressed in a cheap dress, a kind of cowardly-brown Carmelite cloth that blended with the chocolate of her chocolate skin and some old, beaten-up sandals, and a glass in her hand, moving in time with the music, moving her hips, her whole body in a nice way, not obscene but sexy and nice, swaying in rhythm, humming through her lips, her thick, purple lips, in rhythm, shaking her glass in rhythm, rhythmically, nicely, artistically now and the total effect was of a beauty so different, so horrible, so new that I was sorry I hadn’t brought my camera to take a picture of that elephant dancing ballet, that hippopotamus on her toes, that edifice moved by the music and I told Irenita, before asking for her name, interrupting myself when I was asking for her name, just when I was asking for her name, She is the savage beauty of life, without her hearing me naturally, without her understanding even if she had heard me, naturally and I told her, I asked her, I told her Who is that, you.11

There are two immediate responses to Códac’s question. Referring to Irena, another cultural insider, he says: “Ella me dijo con un tono muy desagradable, Es la caguama que canta, la única tortuga que canta boleros, y se rió” [She told me in a very disagreeable tone, She is the singing “caguama,” the only turtle who sings boleros, and she laughed] (67). At this point, Vítor reenters the scene and whispers in Códac’s ear: “Ten cuidado que es la prima de Moby Dick, la Ballena Negra” [Be careful because she is Moby Dick’s cousin, the Black Whale] (67). Angered by that comment, Códac grabs the Spaniard’s arm and tells him: “Gallego de mierda, eres un discriminador de mierda, eres un racista de mierda,

Specularity and the Language of Corpulence 109

culo: eres un culo” [Shitty Spaniard, shitty discriminator, shitty racist, asshole: you’re an asshole] (67–68). Claiming that because Códac was drunk he would not take offense, Vítor quickly departs “como quien pasa entre unas cortinas en la oscuridad del fondo” [like someone slipping through the curtains in the darkness of the background] (68). Unbeknownst to Estrella, she has become the center of attention as these characters observe her and compete to name her in a comical if not disrespectful manner. Although this scene is reminiscent of the ridicule that Césaire’s streetcar passenger experiences, these characters do not laugh in the same way nor for similar reasons. Irena—the local, underdeveloped, and parodied version of an American sex symbol— notices that the photographer has lost interest in her and attacks her black compatriot on the basis of sexuality. Calling Estrella a “caguama” is especially insulting in Cuban slang. In his interview with Rosa María Pereda, Cabrera Infante states that the name refers to a species of turtle that frequents Cuban beaches and about which a series of old fisherman’s legends abound concerning the female’s sexual organ and prowess (1979, 84). Irena’s vicious quip is useless, however, for in the end Códac loses interest in her and turns his full attention to the bolero singer. Almost as if he had overheard Irena’s insulting remark, Vítor jokingly warns Códac to be careful as he likens the diva to another large marine animal. The Spaniard recognizes that his words, if overheard, are potentially explosive, and he takes the added measure of whispering them in the photographer’s ear. To Vítor’s surprise, the comment ignites Códac’s anger. The Spaniard is not just any outsider but a man with whom the photographer shares a colonial history. Vítor was under the mistaken impression that the reference (just between men) to Estrella’s carnality permitted him to use the word “negra” in his jesting. As he quickly discovers, it is precisely the reference to the color of her skin that establishes an uncrossable border between the two men. When Códac begins to insult him, the Cuban wreaks his fury first on the Spaniard’s nationality (“Gallego de mierda”). His outsider status revealed, Vítor is forced to make a hasty exit. At the end of this jostling to privilege his view of Estrella, Códac triumphs over his competition. Let us now interrogate the internal workings of Códac’s description. Movement thoroughly dominates this visual regime. Estrella’s dress changes color in the light and blends with the chocolate color of her skin. These initial observations eroticize her. A series of gerunds set her

110 Specularity and the Language of Corpulence

body in motion, and the adverbial clauses accompanying these gerunds emphasize rhythm. After focusing on these details, Códac attempts to gain critical perspective in order to comprehend the effect that Estrella produces in him, but in this effort, he employs a set of qualifiers (“belleza tan distinta, tan horrible, tan nueva”) that makes it impossible to categorize her allure.12 Unable to accomplish this goal through language, he suddenly thinks about the camera that he has not brought, that is, about the technology that would have permitted him to “capture” the bolero singer completely. After reasoned evaluation and words fail him in this initial approach, after he realizes that he needs but lacks his camera, Códac’s escalating rhythmic description culminates in one example of the choteador’s capabilities: the rhetorical and linguistic masking of a scrutinized subject. Hence, Códac mentally conjures natural and inanimate objects in order to apprehend the diva’s presence, but they end up falling short of their mark, improvised caricatures of an always imminent utterance. The bolero singer does not become an elephant, a hippopotamus, or a building; it is these references that fail to measure up to her significance. Apparently dumbfounded by the sight of her, the photographer babbles and cannot formulate the question that he wants to ask. He struggles to make the singer into a comprehensible whole, into a fixed sign, but he cannot even fuse, in Saussure’s terminology for the signifier, her image with the sound of her name. Thus it is not arbitrary that Códac (the reader’s or listener’s narrative instrument of sight) fails to capture Estrella (the embodiment of a unique voice). What is most compelling about this description is not Estrella’s size but Códac’s verbal performance. I would like to proffer for the moment that his verbosity is an indication that he finds himself in danger of being demasked. Códac’s Focus Despite Códac’s role as both protagonist and narrator, it would be mistaken to consider his perspective of Estrella the result of a personal or idiosyncratic view alone. At this juncture, I would like to underscore the fundamentally collective construction of the gaze under which the bolero singer is placed—not simply because her presence is treated as a spectacle, but because I am interested in elucidating the relationship between her hyperbolic and kinetic corpulence and the representation of Cuban cultural identity in this section of Cabrera Infante’s novel. Two aspects of a Lacanian field of vision are germane to my understanding here:

Specularity and the Language of Corpulence 111

the first is the French psychoanalyst’s reflections on the gaze, and the second is his notion and placement of what he calls the screen within that field. In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Lacan clearly distinguishes between the eye and the gaze in his statement: “I can see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides” (1981, 72). As opposed to the eye’s physiological activity, the gaze is experienced as collective scrutiny. Even though this observation describes Estrella’s hypothetical experience as a viewed subject, it also implies, conversely, that Códac’s perspective is part of a broader specular field. According to Lacan, the gaze is determined by “the presence of others as such” (84).13 Hence, not only does Códac’s aesthetic/verbal jostling with Irena and Vítor to name Estrella exemplify the gaze’s collective constitution, but this competition also reiterates a visual phenomenology that occurs repeatedly throughout the novel. Readers, like the novel’s characters (both local and foreign), are located within or outside a wide imaginary according to their degree of understanding and appreciation for the events that take place on the “cultural stage.” Both groups are interpolated as concurrentes—a term that refers as much to the members of a viewing public as to their competitive participation in public events; it is also the word that the prologue’s MC employs to address his audience (of readers). In her analysis of “Bachata,” the long conversation between Silvestre and Arsenio Cué in Tres tristes tigres, Isabel ÁlvarezBorland notes that “Cabrera Infante’s writings force the outside reader to mediate on the subject of perception and to acknowledge the full implications of its subjectivity as well as the differences between perceived and conceived reality” and that the novelist’s reader “must distance himself from the fictional world while at the same time he is required to be an intimate part of it” (1987, 588; also Gallagher 1974, 57– 58). What Álvarez-Borland ascribes to the reader is equally pertinent to Códac’s function in “Ella cantaba boleros.” Códac’s protagonism as principal viewing subject, therefore, may be considered an instrument through which contested claims about pertinence to local culture are expressed and deployed. Códac not only is a photographer but also carries the name of a commonly imported camera. Despite the name’s appropriateness—a subject to which I will return later—it is still necessary to specify the functions of his focus and their relation to a collective gaze. For Lacan, the

112 Specularity and the Language of Corpulence

gaze and the camera’s instrumentality appear almost synonymous: “What determines me, at the most profound level, in the visible, is the gaze that is outside. It is through the gaze that I enter light and it is from the gaze that I receive its effects. Hence it comes about that the gaze is the instrument though which light is embodied and through which . . . I am photo-graphed” (1981, 106). Again, even though these words are more directly applicable to Estrella’s subjectivity (to the experience, as Fanon might have stated it, of being treated as an object) than to Códac’s, they nonetheless capture the reciprocity of the visual phenomenon that takes place between both characters. At the same time, it must be noted that Lacan’s statement does not sufficiently draw out the differences between the gaze and the technical means by which the photograph constitutes an attempt to apprehend and register that gaze. Silverman critiques Lacan along these lines, asserting that rather than positing the camera as an “independent optical apparatus, he uses it as a signifier for the gaze” (1996, 131–32). According to Silverman, what is lost in Lacan’s formulation, in other words, is the ability to separate the gaze from the camera’s function as both “a representational system and a network of material practices” (136). This separation is crucial if we are to appreciate more profound ways in which Códac is not an objective reporter of events. As protagonist and narrator, he renders Estrella as spectacle (“a representational system”); as a photographer of the nightclub world, he is employed by an entertainment industry (“a network of material practices”) that depends, for its survival, on its capacity to produce and distribute spectacles. What must thus be taken into consideration is that Códac has an immediate investment in masking the singer’s visibility as spectacle, in making her appear larger than she is. A final, significant feature of Lacan’s field of vision for my purposes is his conceptualization of what he calls the screen and its position in a diagram that he provides between the viewer (“point of light”) and the viewed (“picture”) (1981, 91–97). The screen is a site of mediation between the gaze—in particular, the latter’s preexistence as a social construct, that which is willingly and/or inadvertently apprehended in a first look—and the ability of the viewed subject to deploy the apprehensible as mask or even as lure (107). Lacan’s association of the screen with the mask is meant to posit a subjectivity for the viewed subject in spite of the preexistence and imposition of the gaze. What this suggests is that even though the reader is never given direct access to Estrella’s pri-

Specularity and the Language of Corpulence 113

vate thoughts, it is nonetheless necessary to take into account her awareness of or, rather, nonchalance about the gaze. The confident poses that she strikes in her playful banter with Códac aptly illustrate, as Lacan states, that “[i]t is no doubt through the mediation of masks that the masculine and the feminine meet in the most acute, most intense way” (107). Yet, Estrella’s corpulence is never presented as a source of selfconsciousness on her part. Her apparent obesity, therefore, is not the commonly negotiated ground to which Lacan’s definition of the screen might apply. Her hyperbolic corpulence is “universally” imposed by Códac, Irena, and Vítor through a collective gaze. By examining this verbal performance more closely, by attempting to account for “the seeming particularity of [this] society’s visual regime” (Silverman 1996, 135), it is possible to distinguish between the strategies of (in)visibility in Códac’s first glance and the use of choteo, that is to say, his contribution to a collective gaze, and the ideological imperatives that inform and motivate his second look at the bolero singer. Choteo In Latin American fine arts and letters, the notion of aesthetic and narrative practices that employ corpulent images calls to mind two famous Colombians, Fernando Botero and Gabriel García Márquez, and the Cuban writer and theorist of the Baroque and neo-Baroque, Severo Sarduy. Botero’s paintings and sculptures are recognizable because of the rotundity of their forms. Frequently, the artist’s subjects, male and female, are bloated versions of and parodic engagements with European and Latin American figures of authority. Using techniques that parallel Botero’s, García Márquez uses corpulent images to reveal something about storytelling. In “Los funerales de la Mamá Grande” [Mama Grande’s funeral], he describes the matriarchal society in which the physical extensions of Mama Grande refer not only to her size but also to her always burgeoning sociopolitical realm. Moreover, the narrative’s structure invokes acts of storytelling so that Mama Grande’s legend grows as her possessions and the language employed to enumerate them appear to exceed geographic frontiers. Less internationally known than the works of these Colombians (but more notorious where they have been read), Severo Sarduy’s novels feature characters like La Tremenda in Maitreya (1987), a figure whose iconoclasm—resembling Divine’s in John Water’s films—lies in the unrepentant ways in which she strategically flaunts

114 Specularity and the Language of Corpulence

her corpulence. These examples constitute a fairly familiar area of narrative and signifying possibilities in Latin American writing and fine arts. Roberto González Echevarría notes the presence of such large, authoritative female figures in important Latin American texts and determines that their overwhelming size follows a “logic of supplementariness” that he associates with the contradiction in their being simultaneously female and authoritative and with an overcompensation for an “absence” where meaning should lie (1985, 164–65). Silverman, by contrast, suggests that “within certain cultural contexts the female subject might be said to signify not only ‘lack’ but also ‘spectacle’” (1996, 147). In my approach to Códac’s use of choteo to apprehend Estrella’s cultural meaning and location in a first look, I do not wish to associate the bolero singer with an inherently absent meaning and lack. Rather, I want to argue that Códac employs his choteo (his contribution to a collective cultural gaze) in order to defer certain historical knowledge, to lead the reader and himself away in a humorous manner from a direct contemplation of that social “truth.” For outside observers, choteo is first and foremost a popular, vernacular performance that inspires laughter in a very particular way. This performance, however, is not reducible to a “universally” understood joke. In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (first published in 1905), Freud writes that the “tendentious” or intentional joke is either “a hostile joke (serving the purposes of aggressiveness, satire, or defense) or an obscene joke (serving the purpose of exposure)” (1963, 97). Analogous to choteo’s specular configuration, both kinds of joke require at least three people to function: the viewer and originator of the joke, the object of the joke, and a witness or spectator through whom the joke’s pleasure is to be fulfilled (100)—Lacan’s “the presence of others as such” in his definition of the gaze. Although the joke’s performative circumstances are relevant to this discussion, the most evident forms of hostility in the text are Irena’s cruel remark and the tense confrontation between Códac and Vítor. The photographer is not concerned to ridicule the bolero singer but to comprehend her meaning and the effect that it has on him. The purposeful humor in the nightclub scene, therefore, may be the kind that seeks to expose Estrella in some way. However, when Códac eroticizes her by suggesting that the singer’s dress is the same color as her skin, this suggestion does not spark the passage’s humor. Throughout this scene, Códac does not attempt to seduce the diva, at

Specularity and the Language of Corpulence 115

least not at first. She is not even aware that he is looking at her; it is he who is seduced by the sight of her. In short, if there is any narrative method that encourages laughter, it is not the imagined or promised display of Estrella’s nudity but the excessive, almost compulsive robing of her body with new meanings. Ironically, the most relevant hypothesis that Freud offers with respect to Códac’s hyperbole also declares that one can overestimate an object of inquiry. At the beginning of his investigation, Freud distinguishes “tendentious” jokes from “innocent” ones (97). Later, he admits that all jokes are purposeful and advances this observation in a way that lends itself to my discussion of Estrella’s layered corpulence: Sometimes we overestimate the goodness of the joke on account of our admiration for the thought it contains; another time, on the contrary, we overestimate the value of the thought on account of the enjoyment given us by its joking envelope. . . . The thought seeks to wrap itself in a joke because in that way it recommends itself to our attention and can seem more significant and valuable, but above all because this wrapping bribes our powers of criticism and confuses them. . . . Jokes . . . provide the thought by augmenting it and guarding it against criticism. (132–33; emphasis added)

Following Freud’s logic for a moment (and without collapsing choteo into a subcategory of the joke), the hyperbolic corpulence that Códac attaches to Estrella’s body implies that he is not entirely interested in obtaining an exact idea of the bolero singer after all. He “bribes” the reader, and to a lesser extent himself, by generating laughter through the profusion of signifiers with which he envelops the bolero singer’s body. However, Códac’s conduct at this early stage in his encounter with the diva should not be taken as proof of a single-minded, preconceived agenda. What it illustrates, rather, is the preexistence of the protagonist/ narrator’s contribution to the collective gaze that is cast on Estrella. Freud’s approach to his subject presumes and promotes a bias that is methodologically reproduced in the most extensive study of Cuban choteo to date. In Freud’s schema, the basic prerequisite for the effective obscene joke is repression—a behavior corresponding to suppressed impulses that he associates with class and propriety and for which he blames “civilization and higher education” (101). He provides a class analysis of obscene jokes by asserting that they circumvent the inhibitions placed on “us” by imposed codes of conduct: “When we laugh at a refined

116 Specularity and the Language of Corpulence

obscene joke, we are laughing at the same thing that makes a peasant laugh at a course piece of smut; we should feel ashamed or it would seem to us disgusting. We can only laugh when a joke has come to our help” (101). This comment not only alludes to a class distinction but also is distorted by it. To avoid insinuating that “we” might laugh at the same thing that amuses a peasant, Freud invokes two humorous objects and their respective realms of laughter so that “we” laugh at one thing and the peasant at “a course piece of smut.” This difference creates two class-informed areas of humor and, in fact, rehearses the kinds of bourgeois inhibitions that Freud diagnoses. Some of these inhibitions surface in Jorge Mañach’s Indagación del choteo [Research on choteo], the most detailed analysis of the popular cultural practice available. Mañach’s study, originally a lecture that he gave at the Institución Hispano-Cubana de Cultura in 1928, is a rich resource for examining Códac’s first encounter with La Estrella because the intellectual is familiar with the cultural specificity of the visual regime that I have been interrogating. However, it is also essential to highlight Mañach’s discomfort vis-à-vis his own intellectual and nationalist project.14 First, despite his socially privileged status and academic forum, he does not stand outside his history and culture, and, second, it is precisely this awareness that emphasizes for him that he, too, is under the scrutiny of a “popular” gaze. In this light, Mañach’s preliminary apology that his investigation might seem unworthy of serious consideration (1969, 9) indirectly alludes to the unstable borders between reputation and respectability that he must negotiate. Moreover, the apology also hints at the way in which the intellectual (like Códac when he fails to categorize Estrella in a satisfactory utterance) is prepared to propose a topic that belongs to hybridized linguistic registers that meld high and popular cultures and European and African sources that he traces in his etymology of the word choteo (13–15). Clearly, there lies behind this apology the weight of a colonial history in which attempts were made to map and contain the specific binary distinctions of high and low, European and African within patrolled categories of reputation and respectability. In the essay, Mañach describes and accounts for a behavioral idiosyncrasy of the Cuban national character and then urges his listeners and readers to temper this conduct if they wish their nation to make progress. When he calls attention to a collective responsibility to curb what he

Specularity and the Language of Corpulence 117

terms “ese fenómeno psicosocial tan lamentado” [that regretted psychosocial phenomenon] (11), his aims are both pedagogical and patriotic. In order to isolate what he calls choteo’s negative manifestations, he creates two categories of choteador in the same way that Freud divided laughter into two class-informed realms. In this separation, Mañach splits a national cultural habit into two categories: a group of undesirable practitioners and another of recuperable ones. The first group is characterized by “una educación elementalísima, cualquiera que sea su decoro externo” [a very rudimentary upbringing, whatever their external decorum might be] (22); these lack any sensibility for the sublime, and are professional deniers, selfish, and emotionally base. Their choteo is “sistemático” [systematic] (71). By contrast, behind the frivolity and skepticism of the recuperable group reside the sensitive souls of children—a condition that no doubt requires a mediating pedagogy. Members from this group possess a dormant sensibility and are capable of upright behavior. Mañach calls their choteo “ligereza criolla” [Creole fickleness] (51) and “gracia cubana” [Cuban wit] (71). Because he recognizes its ubiquity and because he would like to elevate its practice, Mañach takes great pains not to condemn choteo completely. Notwithstanding, the hierarchy that he delineates among choteadores prescribes an order and politics of belonging to a respectable, bourgeois citizenry. Paraphrasing what the Cuban in the street might say, Mañach defines choteo as “no tomar nada en serio” [not taking anything seriously] and “tirarlo todo a relajo” [going lax on everything] (17), a scatological allusion among several that, according to Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Mañach consistently avoids elaborating (1984, 76). Further reflecting on this attitude, Mañach claims that choteo may not be so much a general lack of seriousness as the inclination not to take seriously what is generally considered serious; it is, in short, “un hábito de irrespetuosidad—motivado por un mismo hecho psicológico: una repugnancia de toda autoridad” [a disrespectful habit—motivated by a single psychological fact: a repugnance for all authority] (1969, 18–19). This harsh essentialism, I believe, is the result of an overcompensation on Mañach’s part for the difficulty of the nation-building project at the level of pedagogical practices and reform. Curiously, this assertion about the choteador’s disrespect leads Mañach into a discussion about the relationship between eyesight and attentiveness. Basing his deductions on the Latin etymology of the

118 Specularity and the Language of Corpulence

word “respect” (re-spicere)—to look again—he claims that the absence of respect is nothing less than a lack of serious attention. This comment invokes the inattentive or even mischievous student, the kind, as it were, that would have been absent from Próspero’s classroom in Rodó’s Ariel. Yet on carefully examining Mañach’s description of the “typical” choteador, it is possible to glimpse qualities that may be applied to Códac, as well as to the gaze within a culturally specific visual regime. Mañach argues that the best candidate for choteo is impressionable, an extrovert or a man who possesses a wandering curiosity; he is generally disrespectful (19) and suffers from the inability “para tomarles el peso exacto a las cosas” [to weigh things accurately] (51; emphasis added). Mañach’s study establishes meaningful connections between effusive language, authority, and the body. Around any respectable person or situation, the choteador can create “una atmósfera de jocosidad que se va cargando rápidamente, hasta hacerse tan densa que el objeto mirado a través de ella resulta desfigurado y grotesco” [a humorous atmosphere that quickly builds up, until it becomes so dense that the object seen through it ends up disfigured and grotesque] (28–29).15 He disconcerts his victim by submitting him or her to an “ambiente ahogador de alusiones, de equívocos, que va formando en torno a ella (la víctima)” [suffocating atmosphere of allusions, of equivocations, that keeps forming around it (the victim)] (70). Mañach’s observations accurately describe the techniques through which the choteador’s language obfuscates its object by applying new layers of significance. Nevertheless, because he is keenly aware of the choteador’s scrutiny as he speaks—an indication of the fear of being masked or demasked by onlookers—it is no surprise that he associates the excessive layering of references with disfigurement, the grotesque, and, in particular, with asphyxiation. He complains that “[a]l intelectual se le ha ridiculizado más entre nosotros mientras mayor rigor ponía en su faena” [the more ridiculed is the intellectual among us the greater the rigor that he applies to his task] (72). Mañach conceptualizes all hyperbolic approaches to the body in negative terms because he wants to curtail the endemic practice and spread of the verbal performance and the attitude that gives rise to it. But because it is still his patriotic task to rescue some of its practitioners, he admits, against the grain of his negative evaluation of choteo’s hyperbole, that the choteador is not interested in being abusive. Deep down, the intellectual states,

Specularity and the Language of Corpulence 119

the choteador often admires the same virtue that he ridicules (36) and is generally never motivated by resentment (37). Compared to the social/professional stature and cultural politics that not only inhibit Mañach from appreciating hyperbolic approaches to figures of authority but also motivate him to devalue their social relevance, Códac, by means of his compulsive verbosity on the subject of Estrella’s carnality, strategizes her (in)visibility within a certain visual regime. I have already argued that although Estrella’s hyperbolic corpulence is attached or imposed on her body through language, this corpulence is not the common denominator that she negotiates against the gaze that is cast upon her. Silverman is aware of such an intimate alliance between language and the specular when she asserts that “the screen or cultural image-repertoire inhabits each of us, much as language does” (1996, 221). I have also claimed that Códac’s choteo is a rhetorical and linguistic masking that speaks volumes about a particular deferral. I use “deferral” not to essentialize Estrella as inapprehensible but to characterize a resounding silence: what goes unnamed in Códac’s first look, because he avoids acknowledging it, is the bolero singer’s color. Her blackness is in fact the collectively negotiated term in the strategies of (in)visibility that I have been examining. The History on the “Screen” Estrella’s hyperbolic corpulence is in a way as separable from her body as the mask is to its bearer or, as Lacan puts it, as the something that informs us of an itself that is behind. In fact, the photographer’s choteo implies that her body is subject to hyperbole about her size to the degree that the acknowledgment of her blackness is held in abeyance. Códac’s initial focus foregrounds the diva’s carnality at the expense of an open acknowledgment of the relationship between a history of AfroCuban presence and the continuity of that presence through song. In this respect, his choteo presages an event that portends historical and cultural meaning. This significance dawns upon him when he finally addresses Estrella, engages her in conversation, and in the process recalls the Spanish colonial explanation that historically rationalized the introduction of African slavery to the Americas. It is from this point onward when he faces and apprehends Estrella’s blackness that Códac inadvertently relates the process of his own demasking:

120 Specularity and the Language of Corpulence

I went up and asked her who she was and she told me, La Estrella [the Star], and I told her, No, no, your name, and she told me, La Estrella, I am La Estrella, boy, and she let out a deep, baritone laugh or however you call a woman’s voice that corresponds to base but sounds like baritone, contralto or something so, and she told me smiling, My name is Estrella, Estrella Rodríguez at your service, she told me and I said to myself, She’s black, black, black, totally black, and we started to talk and I thought what a boring country this would be if it hadn’t been for Father Las Casas and I told him, I bless you, priest, for bringing Negroes from Africa as slaves to alleviate the slavery of the Indians who in any case were coming to an end, and I told Estrella again, Estrella I love you, and she burst out laughing.16

Códac remembers at this precise moment that an African presence plays a vital role in his environment. Significantly, this awareness accompanies Estrella’s self-naming, so that her color (she is black and not mulata as he had first indicated), provenance, and presence before him—and not her corpulence at this critical point in their first exchange—override all other factors in Códac’s mind. I have already noted the hostility with which Códac reacts to Vítor’s comments. Obviously, Vítor’s error had been the untimely attention that he drew to the diva’s color. Yet the manner in which he associates Estrella’s presence with the principal sixteenthcentury advocate of African slavery in the Americas makes Códac’s thoughts more inflammatory than Vítor’s words. On the one hand, the gratitude that he expresses for Las Casas’s argument for the introduction of African slaves to the islands is horrifying and unconscionable, but, on the other hand, this gratitude captures in an appropriately irreverent manner—considering the violent appropriation of the slave’s labor—how local talent is exploited. When he thanks Las Casas for having saved Cuba from boredom, Códac is appreciating Estrella for her entertainment value. In her illuminating study of the bolero and other popular songs in Cuba, Iris M. Zavala argues that the emergence of the bolero on the island around 1888 was clearly related to the abolition of slavery in 1881 (1997, 191). Estrella, however, resists total objectification and dehumanization as well as she can. The entire nightclub scene is a prelude to a special event: the ineffable sound of the bolero singer’s voice. Her voice and talent move Códac and the rest of the chowcito and are ultimately more meaningful and elusive than a systematic bursting into song. Estrella is a seasoned artist with established guidelines for her art, which include that

Specularity and the Language of Corpulence 121

she only sings boleros and that she always does so alone and unaccompanied by musicians (1994, 72). She possesses, in other words, a seriousness about and comprehension of her public visibility and presence. In her performances, she satisfies in a convincing manner—that is, both personally and professionally—the public’s demand for a woman’s private feelings or “verdadero sentimiento” [true feelings], as Códac calls it (70). She assumes the responsibilities of expressing sentiments with which the public can identify, of helping to liberate for her audience “genuine” emotions that its members suppress within local strains of bourgeois propriety, and last but not least, of fruitfully transgressing the distinctions between the public and the private, reputation and respectability.17 For Zavala, not only does the bolero form exhibit traces of “the linguistic dimension of the class struggle” but it also “helps rewrite emotions, desires, imaginations and imaginaries, beliefs, social and sexual attitudes, transferring them from the pantheon of models and their customary relations into new meanings and relations” (1997, 189). Estrella captivates her audience because she can determine in an impromptu manner when, how, and for whom she should sing by constantly drawing or erasing the limits of the performable. Hence, her performances and unpredictable behavior do not indicate, as Claudia Cairo Resnick has suggested, that her character is flawed or that she is “physically obscene and emotionally pathetic” (1976, 15); rather, they provide evidence of the difficulty of a task in which she is expected to reveal her feelings through song and turn herself emotionally inside out at will and still affirm a seamless identity and personal integrity. The limits that Estrella places on her performances, therefore, constitute her stance vis-à-vis the social contradictions that emerge from bringing her ambitions and talent into play with the demands of Cuba’s entertainment industry before the socialist revolution. What becomes evident in Códac’s behavior after he sees and listens to the bolero singer for the first time is his radically changed attitude toward her body. The photographer’s ruminations about the singer’s talent begin to disclose his new motives: “Se me ocurrió que a la Estrella había que descubrirla” [It occurred to me that it was necessary to discover Estrella] (1994, 126). For Códac and other promoters in Havana’s nightclub scene, Estrella’s body so hinders her rise to stardom that in their attempts to “refine” her talent through the entertainment industry’s aestheticizing paraphernalia, it is her body that becomes recon-

122 Specularity and the Language of Corpulence

figured, exoticized, and even expendable. The change in Códac’s look is crucial because it deflates the image and discourse of obesity that I noted in the photographer’s initial description of the singer and have examined in this chapter. If it can be argued that Códac’s choteo inserts the bolero singer “into the picture,” then his program for “discovery” and his new attitude toward her belie an approach that is completely antagonistic to her carnality: “Me dije que había que separar ese oro de su voz de la ganga en que lo envolvió la Naturaleza, la Providencia o lo que fuera, que había que extraer aquel diamante de la moñtana de mierda en que estaba sepultado” [I said to myself that it was necessary to separate that golden voice from the padding in which Nature, Providence, or whatever enveloped her, that it was necessary to extract that diamond from the mountain of shit in which it was buried] (126). Ultimately, his second look at her abandons choteo in favor of a scrutiny based on cultivating the diva’s marketability. Códac discards the pleonasms in which he reveled as a choteador. Instead of extolling her unique voice by paying homage to its physical confines, he is now keen to “extract” it, remove it from a corpulence that he deems no longer necessary and a hindrance to his plans. Similarly, when Estrella is eventually sponsored by an American entertainment entrepreneur, the agreement that she signs directly affects her body. The bolero singer becomes a star in Cuba and Mexico City and must endure compromises in legal contracts and other show business practices that stipulate that she has to sing with an orchestra (which she drowns out anyway); wear clothes and cosmetics that make her look grotesque in Códac’s eyes (301); and record an album that fails to capture the beauty of her voice. In this local and foreign quest for the material representation of cultural identity, Estrella’s body is rendered abject in terms of the rejection and exclusion of the bolero singer from particular social circles so that she is obliged to inhabit, in Judith Butler’s definition of the “abject,” “‘unlivable’ and ‘uninhabitable’ zones of social life” (1993, 3). But the need to separate her voice from her body suggests that in the name of such an iconic representation it is her body that becomes “deformed,” “unhabitable,” and deidealized. It is almost a cliché in some critical circles to expect the foreign entrepreneur to be the exploiter. Because this exploitation is prevalent in the Caribbean not just as tourism but as ideologies of culture that often require an alienated and alienating critical eye and voice, the issue is

Specularity and the Language of Corpulence 123

much more complex than a local “us” versus a foreign “them.” The inadequacy of this juxtaposition is fathomable not only in Códac’s opportunistic look but also in his interiorization—as Césaire came to realize when he looked at his fellow streetcar passenger for the first time—of an “alien” eye/I. This ambivalence manifests itself in the nightclub scene. Because he experiences insuperable difficulties verbally capturing and re-presenting her significance, the photographer reaches for his camera. It is only when he realizes that he has forgotten it—so that he becomes a photographer without his camera, a man, as it were, without his equipment, and an insider without the structures to register the object of his attention—that he presses his choteo into service. The reflex action to seek out his camera is significant because it delimits the outsideness that Códac internalizes as a visual evaluator of his own cultural identity and a provider/surveyor of its icons; for him “La Estrella era el Lutero de la música cubana” [Estrella was the North Star of Cuban music] (1994, 298). But there is a more intriguing facet to Códac’s simultaneously internal and external position. The “screen” or “imagerepertoire” that he invokes in a moment of conceptual difficulty, that is, the ballet-dancing elephant and the hippopotamus on its toes, are directly taken from that famous, international fabricator of images Walt Disney, in particular from Fantasia. In this respect, Códac spontaneously projects for his own consumption the fantasies of an intervening eye/I or, at least, in Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant’s terms, Códac suffers from the problem of having “the Other’s pupils under [his] eyelids” (1993, 85). Encore The last segment of “Ella cantaba boleros” describes Estrella’s unceremonious death and burial. The choteador’s narrative dexterity is brought into play for the last time and especially for this occasion since, as Mañach claims, “[e]l choteo no respeta ni la presencia sagrada de la muerte” [choteo does not even respect the sacred presence of death] (1969, 36). Estrella’s body is, as it were, embalmed for posterity in exaggeration, jest, nostalgia, and myth. Having attained some measure of success in Caracas, San Juan, and Mexico City, the bolero singer succumbs to heart failure after consuming a large dinner while on tour in the Mexican capital. Due to unresolved litigations between Mexican and Cuban impresarios over the cost of returning her body to the island, the bolero

124 Specularity and the Language of Corpulence

singer ends up being buried in Mexico. Or so the story ends in the novel. Cabrera Infante includes a second version of the diva’s “burial” as the appendix or “Metafinal” in Ella cantaba boleros. But this alternative or corrected version of the novel’s end is itself a commentary on the impossibility of closure: the choteador infuses Estrella’s mortal remains, or what should be her remains, with unusual vitality. In this version, the singer is not buried in Mexico. After failed attempts at embalming her body and placing it on ice, the crew of the ship on which the cadaver was supposed to be transported pushes the coffin overboard, relieved to be rid of the stench that had begun to emanate from it under the Vera Cruz sun. At first, and despite thwarted efforts to sink it, the coffin remains afloat—wrapped in chocolate-brown cloth because the crew could not find or did not know what the Cuban flag looked like and because the color reminded them of Cuban cigars (1994, 303). Suddenly, taking on a life of its own, the coffin turns, rams the ship, and sinks it. To the profound dismay of the crew, Estrella was last seen “en su tumba flotante” [in her floating tomb] heading out to sea and, according to the choteador, probably circling the globe (308). I have looked at the ways in which Estrella’s corpulence is employed to (re)configure strategies of black (in)visibility in prerevolutionary Cuba. As I pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, Códac stages these strategies in a discourse of urban popular culture. My reading has sought to illustrate how Códac’s exaggerations in his first look at Estrella constitute the modes through which the bolero singer becomes, according to Lacan’s view of mimicry, “inscribed in the picture.” The “Metafinal” does not change the ambivalent appreciation for blackness within Cuban national discourse that the choteador expresses. What it does accomplish, however, is the creation and dissemination of a poststructuralist, deterritorialized signifier of national culture—a “floating tomb” circling the globe—that captures both the frustrations and hope of exiled Cuban communities. In this sense—and in a slightly more optimistic perspective than the implications for Cubanness of a burial in Mexico—Estrella’s body (and, by implication, Afro-Cuban culture) is rendered perennially recuperable. Cabrera Infante began his novel as a form of protest against the ways in which Castro’s new regime had sought to police popular culture. The novelist thus deploys Estrella’s corpulence to override the censorship, both visual and verbal, that Castro’s government was prepared to impose on popular culture because of the

Specularity and the Language of Corpulence 125

capitalist decadence that it supposedly conserved. Setting Estrella’s coffin adrift is Cabrera Infante’s way of keeping the memory of a prerevolutionary Cuban nationalism alive. Yet because Códac employs his verbosity about Estrella’s size as a ruse to “conceal” her blackness, the issue of black (in)visibility in Cuban national discourse also resurfaces. As it is practiced throughout the Caribbean, choteo and its variants are not inherent cultural attitudes, as both Cabrera Infante and Mañach before him suggest, but constitute strategic practices through which it becomes possible to evaluate and intervene in the daily production of a type of orality within a specific cultural context. However, in a text that endlessly plays with the spoken word, Códac’s choteo is never uttered openly but thought in privacy and as nostalgia. That is to say, in the novel, the photographer does not provide his thoughts for public scrutiny, intervention, or engaged “play” as Drewal describes this process of critical improvisation and choice making. Consequently, as he approaches his compatriot and objectifies her body, questions about Códac’s cultural insideness and alienation necessarily come to the fore. By “objectification” I am referring to Richard Schmitt’s argument that “[o]bjectification is not turning people into things— that cannot be done—but pretending that they are things” (1996, 39). Because Códac practices such a “denial of genuine humanity” (41) by relentlessly dehumanizing Estrella’s body in his own mind, the photographer guards himself against the kind of shock of self-recognition and demasking that the poetic voice in Césaire’s poem experienced when he faced his fellow passenger. As an ideologically sustained lens might, the photographer focused on and masked the woman who stood before his eyes.

CHAPTER FOUR Turning a Blind Eye in the Name of the Law Cultural Alienation in Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magnifique

And in this inert town, this squalling throng so astonishingly detoured from its cry as this town has been from its movement, from its meaning, not even worried, detoured from its true cry, the only cry you would have wanted to hear because you feel it alone belongs to this town; because you feel it lives in it in some deep refuge and pride in this inert town, this throng detoured from its cry of hunger, of poverty, of revolt, of hatred, this throng so strangely chattering and mute. —aimé césaire, Cahier d’un retours au pays natal I balance it against the systematic refusal to see. I was amazed to hear a couple of French civil servants, charming individuals, admit, with complacent sighs, that things were fine in Martinique and that they could not understand why everyone else spoke so anxiously about the social climate and conflicts in the country. The subtle assimilation of the colonial complex is what explains this level of naivete. —édouard glissant, Le discours antillais

Alienation is often characterized as an innocence that is decipherable in others or, less frequently, that one unexpectedly perceives in oneself and then may strive to overcome. The excerpt from Césaire’s seminal poem that I have quoted provides a familiar portrait of collective alienation in which an omniscient voice evokes a throng of people that lives calmly removed from its own “sens” [meaning] and “vrai cri” [true cry]. According to this voice, alienation lies embedded in the paradoxical simultaneity of the throng’s legitimate cry for social justice and its failure to enun126

Turning a Blind Eye 127

ciate this cry. This alienation, ostensibly that of Martinicans and, perhaps, French West Indians as a whole, astonishes the poetic voice not only because the people that it describes live in close proximity to— consistently “à côté de” [next to]—visible proof of its oppression, but especially because this throng is alienated from its own self-expression (“à côté de son cri”). Consequently, the crowd is both loquacious and silent; that is to say, it is verbose without addressing the underlying causes of its oppression. Alienation is manifested here as the throng’s inability or refusal to perceive and denounce oppression in a direct and open way. When he wrote these lines in the early 1940s, a few years before the French West Indian colonies became French overseas departments in 1946, Césaire’s aim was to denounce imperialism and to counteract its local, psychological, and social influences through a poetics of (self-) demasking, a process that Ngugi wa Thiong’o would today term a decolonization of the mind.1 Yet even after or, rather, precisely because of departmentalization—the relative political autonomy and full citizenship that the French government conceded to the inhabitants of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana—cultural alienation is the main social phenomenon that many French West Indian intellectuals condemn and against which they themselves struggle. For Édouard Glissant, this cultural alienation had been historically institutionalized before departmentalization in the form of a “double croyance” [double conviction] that these countries could not survive on their own and that their inhabitants are in fact French, as opposed to other colonized people who remain African or Indochinese. It was under the perfidious influence of this double conviction, he asserts, that the French Caribbean supplied officials for the colonization of Africa (1997, 22). In terms reminiscent of Césaire’s description of the throng’s inability to express its own cry, Glissant refers to departmentalization as the “[c]oncrétisation la plus achevée de la peur et du déni de soi, elle marque la limite extrême de l’aliénation, la limite aussi de son expression” (1997, 268) [The most concrete form of fear and self-denial, marking the extreme edge of alienation, the limit of self-expression as well] (1992, 88).2 Other studies that focus more exclusively on French West Indian politics have observed and investigated how this political and cultural alienation has produced similar kinds of disabling paradoxes in the islands.3 Yet evaluating the degree to which one’s own people may be alienated

128 Turning a Blind Eye

is also an act of critical distancing. In Césaire’s poem, the poetic voice begins by describing the island community from a particular omniscience. Subsequently, in a self-conscious move to disclose the limits of this omniscience, the poetic voice also inscribes itself in the picture and urges the country—“ce pays mien” [this land of mine]—to embrace it without fear (1983, 44). Its goal, the poetic voice states, is to speak on its behalf: “My mouth shall be the mouth of those calamities that have no mouth, my voice, the freedom of those who break down in the solitary confinement of despair.” And on the way I would say to myself: “And above all, my body as well as my soul, beware of assuming the sterile attitude of a spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of miseries is not a proscenium, a man screaming is not a dancing bear.”4

The poetic voice implies that what invokes fear and suspicion is the assertive stance and direct engagement (as opposed to the crowd’s apparent passivity and alienated chatter) that the poetic voice assumes. Clearly, this voice stakes its claim as the vehicle of expression (“Ma bouche sera la bouche . . .”) between the crowd’s visible oppression and its “true cry,” but it also warns itself against becoming alienated in that role, a mere spectator of life and other people’s sufferings. This ideal to speak as a self-conscious, decolonized voice on his people’s behalf lies at the heart of Césaire’s prescriptive poetics of the intellectual’s return to his or her colonized land.5 The poetic voice’s view that the crowd is alienated, followed by its sincerely professed vocation to become its only vehicle of expression, signals the waning presence of and nostalgia for a figure of countercultural authority within the island’s colonial regime and one that subsequently became a mythical folk hero during the twentieth century. This nostalgia is a critical attitude that not only pays homage to the survival of anticolonial social practices but also rhetorically posits the folk hero as the unmediated voice of “the people.” In the case of Martinique, this nostalgia and its implicit critique of contemporary culture are designated by a discourse that accounts for the disappearance of the conteur from the island’s daily social life. Patrick Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magni-

Turning a Blind Eye 129

fique (1988) is a novel that narrates the circumstances surrounding the conteur’s death at the close of carnival festivities in Fort-de-France and the immediate consequences of this death for the local community. If Césaire’s poem implies that the influence of figures such as the conteur was on the wane (or, at least, that his “voice” no longer corresponded to the kinds of modern, anticolonial, countercultural resistance that were required for an emerging nationalism) in the 1940s, Chamoiseau’s novel records the demise of this folk hero’s active or self-perpetuating cultural existence by the 1980s. Solibo’s death by a sudden “égorgette de la parole” [internal linguistic choking],6 an apparently inexplicable and thus highly suspicious occurrence for the island’s authorities, is announced as an undisputed fact at the beginning of the novel: the conteur’s corpse (and the moribund oral traditions that it is held to embody) lies in plain sight at the foot of an old tamarind tree in the city’s savanne or main park. Treated in isolation, the conteur’s death proffers a pessimism in which “the people’s” alienation from their “true cry” appears profoundly and irrevocably embedded. But Chamoiseau’s novel provides a more comprehensive analysis of the current structure and inner machinations of neocolonial domination than the merely disabling lament that French cultural hegemony has decimated the island’s traditional forms of popular culture. On one level, the novel’s intrigue partly unfolds through a series of oral recollections by marginalized town dwellers who had gathered, as they did on occasion, to listen to and participate in the disquisitions that Solibo elaborated and performed at night. Also, although Chamoiseau appears as a character who observes, researches, and writes in order to lay claim to the conteur’s cultural heritage and skills, the novelist avoids total omniscience by presenting himself in the plot and employing a self-reflexive, narrative approach to these recollections. Both Césaire and Chamoiseau camouflage themselves, in the Lacanian sense of the term, through self-inscription and, in this manner, succeed in presenting themselves as the conteur’s successors. I am interested in examining this new stage in representations of relations between the conteur, his audiences, and the discourse on nostalgia in Chamoiseau’s novel. In the next section, I will describe and interrogate the conteur’s traditional role in Martinican popular culture, as well as the contextualization of this role in the novel.

130 Turning a Blind Eye

On another level, the conteur’s disappearance from daily social life is more complex an issue than a simply stated case of French cultural hegemony. Solibo Magnifique illustrates an avoidance or, in some cases, the inability of the state’s local officials to see and take responsibility (to demask themselves) for their role in the marginalization of traditional forms of local popular culture. Glissant refers to this kind of “innocence” among French and, as I will illustrate, Martinican upholders of law and order in the novel as a systematic blindness and “réflexe colonialiste” (1997, 780) [colonial complex (1992, 246)]. Hence, the hypothesis that I explore in my reading of the novel is that because of the ways in which cultural alienation has been institutionalized and practiced as an unquestioned conviction in particular notions of Frenchness, the official police investigation of Solibo’s unusual and tragic end necessarily approaches the conteur’s outwardly nonviolent death as if it were the result of a crime in which the neocolonial state plays no role. In “Politics and Society in Martinique,” Fred Reno undertakes to “show how the local population and élite accept the power structures, values and personnel from France” (1995, 35). My study has a similar goal, but I want to investigate how that acceptance is both consciously and unreflexively practiced by the local representatives of law and order in the novel. The investigating officials’ “systematic blindness” is exacerbated not only by their insistence on strict adherence to the law but especially by the overdetermined and violent means through which they seek to ensure that adherence. I make reference to their practice of turning a blind eye in the name of the law—a particularly ironic and frequently (neo)colonial distortion of the notion that justice is blind—in order to describe the intensity with which they seem compelled to perform their more questionable duties. Thus, in this chapter, I would like to draw attention once again to Zˇiˇzek’s statement that in response to the popular use of various forms of irony and sarcasm, the ruling classes deploy an ideological mask of cynical reason—that is, a deliberate demand for rectitude and obedience to the law at the same time that they perpetuate their socioeconomic practices—and to Dayan’s claim that masks of virtue disguised racist segregation in Haiti just prior to its revolution. These claims need to be contextualized for this study. I want to elucidate certain aspects of the authorities’ ideological mask of cynical reason by investigating the investigators in Chamoiseau’s novel, as it were, by examining

Turning a Blind Eye 131

the destructive ways in which these local and visible representatives of the ruling classes act in the name of the law to reinforce their “systematic blindness.” The Conteur and the Creole Folktale In their history of French West Indian literature, Lettres créoles, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant locate the conteur’s origin in the sugar plantations. As opposed to the Nègre marron [runaway or maroon], whom they describe as the inheritor of the “cri” [shout or cry] of revolt that emerged from an African on the slave ship (1991, 32), the conteur is “l’artiste du cri” [the artist of the cry], who in the heart of the sugarocracy engaged in resistance to the colonial order by employing his “art” as mask and instructional device (35). With the gradual disappearance of the maroon, day-to-day anticolonial resistance was left to the conteur, the principal disseminator on the plantation of an “oraliture créole” that successfully managed to locate “le lieu du marronage dedans l’habitation” [the site of marronage within the plantation] (56–59).7 Chamoiseau and Confiant’s theorization of resistance to the colonial order in the figure of the resolute maroon and outsider, on the one hand, and in the conteur, the subversive insider, on the other, approximates the degrees of rebellion that Lovelace posited in the characters Fisheye (the “warrior”) and Aldrick (the dragon-mask maker). There lies in both sets of distinctions the difference between the maroon’s and the warrior’s unwavering rebellion as he places himself or attempts to remain outside the dominant culture and the conteur’s and the mask maker’s skillfulness at their “art” and subversiveness from within that culture. These authors juxtapose notions of active rebellion and subversive art according to specific historical contexts and ideological motives. Consequently, Chamoiseau and Confiant’s study and Lovelace’s novel evoke the transformations and “fate” of these archetypes and their degrees of resistance to the dominant culture in different ways. The Dragon Can’t Dance accounts for Aldrick’s trajectory from the use of his mask-making craft and performance, while he engaged in lower-frequency politics, to an undisguised open rebellion or warriorhood in the face of a national independence that did not dismantle colonial socioeconomic hierarchies. As it is described in Lettres créoles, the disappearance of the maroon—a process that Dash sees as the shift from the “pieties of maroonism” to a

132 Turning a Blind Eye

“poetics of liminality” (1998, 148)—resulted in the embodiment of practically all countercultural resistance and authority in the conteur and in what Chamoiseau and Confiant describe as his tolerated and thus partly official status on the plantation (1991, 36).8 These authors posit an ambivalence in the conteur’s status that it will be necessary to examine later in this section of the chapter. According to Chamoiseau and Confiant, the conteur exercised four traditional functions. The first was to be “celui qui donne voix au groupe” [he who gives voice to the group] (62). The conteur was the conductor of a collective imaginary who orchestrated a collective voice through various call and response techniques. For example, the “E kriii” that the conteur would emit at the end of a tale was an invitation for those in attendance to participate by responding “E kraa.” This call and response technique, one of several at his disposal, is a widely practiced form of interpellation in many of plantation America’s African-based or -influenced oral practices that could unite a group of participants despite their culturally diverse origins.9 It is essential to note, however, that the conteur’s nightly disquisitions could not be carried out successfully before a group of mere spectators because his performances required the crowd’s interventions. The conteur’s second function was that of the community’s “gardien des mémoires” [the guardian of memory] (62). In a situation in which colonial regimes forcibly brought various peoples into contact for the first time, the conteur became instrumental not only in remaking and reconsidering everything for a new life—in this sense, he exemplified Walcott’s notion of mimicry as the creation of culture from “the loss of history”—but also in weaving together different strands of memory within a Creole discourse for a new reading of the world (63). The third function that the conteur performed was that of distracting and entertaining his listeners (distraire) (63), for laughter served as a reminder of and bolster for a human spirit that could transcend the miseries of slavery. The conteur also presided at wakes, thereby encouraging listeners to accompany the family of the deceased through the night. The conteur’s fourth social function, “verbaliser la résistance” [to verbalize resistance] (63), was related in a complex way to his third function. Since slaves on the plantation lived in a perennial struggle with “real death” and “symbolic death,” the conteur urged listeners to laugh, sing, dance, and break the silence (63). This call to celebrate life, as well as to persevere in spite of slavery, transformed the conteur’s

Turning a Blind Eye 133

“entertainment” into the resistance that the slaves’ willingness to live represented for their community. Undoubtedly, the conteur—like the quimboiseur or diviner, whose role he sometimes also fulfilled—was an authoritative figure on the plantation for slaves. Yet because this authority was rigidly circumscribed by laws and codes that regulated all aspects of the slaves’ plantation life, the extent of his power to “verbalize resistance” would become most evident in his nightly disquisitions. But even in these performances, the conteur was only as effective in communicating resistance as his oblique, subversive utterances could be apprehended. Describing Solibo’s typical disquisition, the novel’s narrator states that it was not a matter of comprehending what was being said but of opening oneself to the telling and of permitting oneself to be carried by it (Chamoiseau 1988, 33). To attain this measure of opacity, according to Chamoiseau and Confiant, the conteur’s most frequent strategies included the dissimulation of his message, the strategy of an unclear voice, and a practice of self-effacement (1991, 59–60). These strategies purposefully reduced the conteur’s full visibility on the plantation and functioned to transform him into a “personnage quasi officiel qui . . . doit dissimuler sa parole héritière du cri et compliquer les tracées de ses ruses” [a quasi-official character who . . . must dissimulate his inherited language of the cry and complicate the traces of his ruses] (36). However, Chamoiseau and Confiant subsequently claim that the conteur is official because the white master in sometimes understanding him tolerates his presence on the plantation as the spokesman for an enslaved people (59). This ambivalence about considering the conteur’s status on the plantation official or semiofficial exemplifies and goes to the heart of a critical debate about the efficacy of the conteur’s subversiveness, open conspiracy, or lower-frequency politics. And before the significance of the conteur’s death can be appreciated both in Chamoiseau’s novel and in Martinican society, it is essential to shed some light on the supposition that his strategies of self-effacement, dissimulation, and opacity are manifestations of his powerlessness. In contrast to Chamoiseau’s and Confiant’s ascription of a compromised authority to the conteur, Glissant locates this feature within the Creole folktale itself: “The Creole folktale is the symbolic strategy through which, in the world of the plantations, the mass of Martinicans developed a forced poetics (which we will also call a counterpoetics) in which were manifested both an inability to liberate oneself totally and an insistence

134 Turning a Blind Eye

on attempting to do so” (1992, 128).10 There are echoes here of the throng in Césaire’s poem that is both loquacious and mute, alienated from its meaning and “true cry.” Nonetheless, Glissant’s statement accurately describes the origins of a circumscribed Creole expression on the plantation during slavery. As I illustrated in the introduction, colonial oppression is historically responsible for the emergence of partially concealed (semiofficial) sites of resistance and lower-frequency politics when it proved dangerous for slaves to pursue absolute personal rebellion on a daily basis. By the same token, what needs to be queried when Glissant juxtaposes the inability to liberate oneself totally and the desire to achieve that degree of liberation is the erroneous presupposition that total liberation exists as a real or nonutopian possibility for subjects within any regime, colonial or otherwise. The paradox that he considers central to particularities such as the forced poetics of and alienation within Creole expression is in the first place pertinent to a more universal, dialectical reciprocity between the dream of absolute liberation and the desire for that liberation, between utopian representations and the ideologies that emerge with them. Given the hegemonic colonial pressures exerted on the development of the Creole folktale and expression during slavery, there is no historical basis (except in marronage) for the requirement that absolute liberation be the measure against which the Creole folktale and expression ought to be evaluated. In viewing these forms as inherently compromised at the same time that he demands nothing less than absolute liberation from them, Glissant locates these expressions a priori into a closed system and quandary (“une impuissance”).11 Yet Glissant’s observations about the strategies that emerge from semiofficial sites and practices of lower-frequency politics are accurate. In tracing the folktale’s subsequent development, he argues that certain shortcomings become overdetermined in characteristic fashion in the folktale’s imagery and that “[l]e remarquable est que cette surdétermination est toujours elliptique, rapide, camouflée de dérisoire” (1997, 413) [What is remarkable is that this process is always elliptical, quick, camouflaged by derision] (1992, 128).12 These dynamic traits facilitate an opaque expression that corresponds to the limits that life on the plantation placed on the conteur’s authority. Valorizing opacity positively (1997, 474) and advocating the right of each community to possess a shared obscurity (473), Glissant asserts that

Turning a Blind Eye 135

Western thought has led us to believe that a work must always put itself constantly at our disposal, and I know a number of our folktales, the power of whose impact on their audience has nothing to do with the clarity of their meaning. It can happen that the work is not written for someone, but to dismantle the complex mechanism of frustration and the infinite forms of oppression (1992, 107).13

The folktale’s opacity is in the final instance therapeutic. The rhetorical figures and strategies that facilitate opacity in Martinican Creole expression exemplify what Glissant calls “Diversion” (“Le Détour”)—an early cultural practice through which the relocated population, not yet a nation, began coming to terms with the impossibility of return or “Reversion” (“Le Retour”) (1997, 47). Proposing that Creole represents the first area of diversion in Martinique (48–49), Glissant writes that “Le Détour n’est pas un refus systématique de voir. Non, ce n’est pas un mode de la cécité volontaire ni une pratique délibérée de fuite devant les réalités. Nous dirions plutôt qu’il résulte, comme coutume, d’un enchevêtrement de négativités assumées comme telles” (48) [Diversion is not a systematic refusal to see. No, it is not a kind of self-inflicted blindness nor a conscious strategy of flight in the face of reality. Rather, we would say that it is formed, like a habit, from an interweaving of negative forces that go unchallenged] (1992, 19). In this study, I view these “negative forces” as internalized social antagonisms, as that harmful “double croyance” that encourages (neo)colonial subjects to consider themselves French through violent means. Glissant’s use of the term “Détour” is consistent with the conteur’s third function in Chamoiseau and Confiant’s study, that of distracting and entertaining (distraire). Equally significant is the fact that Glissant posits the practice and, in particular, the opacity that it produces as both strategic and therapeutic. This view, that the opacity in Creole is functional, clearly distinguishes Glissant’s claim from the assertion in Césaire’s poem that the throng’s alienation is discernible in the discrepancy between its talkativeness and what should be its “true cry.” The “Death” of the Conteur Because he was the most established and public disseminator of Creole in Martinican society—the one who gave voice to the group, the guardian of collective memory for the authors of Lettres créoles—the conteur’s fate

136 Turning a Blind Eye

has been closely tied to the knowledge and use of this nation-language.14 Glissant argues that Martinican Creole is no longer a functional language (1997, 60). The Diversion that began as a crucial response and attitude toward the New World environment has been superseded by the need for a national language and for the incorporation of a healthy dose of Reversion (a return not to origins but to the point of cultural entanglement that the practice of Diversion initially eluded) so that the urgent work of creolization might take place (56–57). In short, Diversion is pointless today if the original trickster strategy cannot be transcended in order to tackle that foundational entanglement (53). Glissant summarizes his view, further concluding that “[l]e drame martiniquais du créole est qu’en lui le pacte s’éteint, mais que la langue (en tant qu’ouverture) n’apparaît pas. La fonction de communauté secrète s’épuise, la fonction de communauté offerte ne se décide pas” (1997, 408) [The dilemma of Martinican Creole is that the stage of the secret code has been passed, but language (as a new opening) has not been attained. The secretiveness of the community is no longer functional, the stage of an open community has not been reached] (1992, 125). Thus, what no longer operate successfully in contemporary Martinique are Creole’s opacity, its camouflage (1997, 50), and the counterpoetics of verbal delirium (412) so reminiscent of certain aspects of choteo in its penchant for Baroque excesses and circumlocutions. In this scenario, the conteur is unable to carry out his role unless the common will facilitates the economic, social, and political conditions for the development of Creole into a language (611). Not surprisingly, these circumstances in which a collective will is said to disintegrate so that it no longer informs or facilitates a local expression of popular culture—thereby rendering that expression “obsolete”—also capture Aldrick’s plight and the abandonment of his dragon mask. Although it is a topic that deserves more attention than I can devote to it here, the conteur’s “death” and that of the dragon mask are alike even if the former occurs in Martinique’s more ostensible dependence on France than the latter’s emergence in politically independent Trinidad and Tobago. Through this analogy of parallel states of collective alienation from particular local traditions, I mean to point out, first, that political independence is not and should not be considered a reliable indicator of cultural awareness and autonomy. This assertion is not new. But because nationalist, political, and ideological camps frequently nat-

Turning a Blind Eye 137

uralize cultural objects and practices, appropriate and isolate them from other similar objects and practices (in the rest of the Caribbean, for example), what often fades into the background is the knowledge that the nation, as Fanon argues in The Wretched of the Earth, is the condition of culture and not the other way around (1968, 124–25). Second, I want to suggest that neoliberal economic forces and the pressures to globalize that they currently exert on local cultures are equally “at home” throughout the Caribbean, regardless of the islands’ respective postindependence configurations. As I mentioned earlier, Glissant cites departmentalization and the double conviction that the islands could not survive independently and that they are essentially French as the principal reasons for the current state of cultural and political alienation in Martinique and the other French overseas departments. Furthermore, the growing hegemony of the French language itself must also be considered since Creole has reached a state of exhaustion and has become more French in its daily usage (1997, 403). At the same time, what passes for folklore and folk expression in all forms of mass media on the island is carefully depoliticized for local and foreign consumption (703–4). In Éloge de la créolité [In praise of creoleness], an essay and manifesto that advocates the critical and creative advantages of creolization, Jean Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant arrive at similar conclusions: After the failure of the plantation system (sugar crises, abolitions of slavery, etc.), after the destructurings, the restructurings, the consequent conversions and reconversions of all kinds (assimilation, departmentalization), there was no use for this oral force; it was useless to the citizens’ lives. Only Frenchness (the adoption of both French language and French values) expressed Man in a society totally alienated. (1993, 95)15

Unlike the distance, the alienation that separates the throng’s chatter and its “authentic” voice in Césaire’s poem, the debilitating gap for Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant is one that lies between a Creole oral tradition and a written language that attempts but fails to be universally modern. Alienation is thus the failure to integrate Creole oraliture into a broader world view (35). This consensus on the failure to incorporate Creole oral traditions and Glissant’s analysis of the effects of departmentalization on those traditions broach the issue of the conteur’s death in ways that transcend Césaire’s representation of the throng’s speech as compulsive and self-alienating.

138 Turning a Blind Eye

Chamoiseau’s representation of the conteur’s death by linguistic choking in Solibo Magnifique has been long in the making. Congo, one of the novel’s characters, intimates that “si Solibo est mort, ça couvait depuis longtemps, plus longtemps que maintenant” [if Solibo is dead, that has been happening for a long time, longer than nowadays] (Chamoiseau 1988, 41). In Lettres créoles, Chamoiseau and Confiant associate the first silence after the initial cries on the slave ship with the “[s]ilence de la mort sous une langue avalée” [silence of death under a swallowed tongue] (1991, 33), which is not to imply that Solibo’s death began on the slave ship. What I want to highlight is the tacit agreement in some of the texts that I have cited that images of choking and suffocation are the ones that have been regularly chosen to communicate the powerlessness that derives from the destruction and loss of community. Comparing Martinique unfavorably with other Caribbean cultures, Glissant laments, almost as if to anticipate the circumstances of Solibo’s demise, that “[n]ous avons tant de mots rentrés dans la gorge” (1997, 427) [We have so many words tucked away in our throats] (1992, 140) and that “[l]es signes sont visibles, que la collectivité est menacée d’étouffement lent, d’effacement imperceptible” (1997, 703) [There are visible signs that the community is threatened by slow suffocation, by gradual disappearance] (1992, 210). Finally, in Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, we come across a startling image in which the morne (bush in English; monte in Spanish)—in the poem, that topography of misery on the one hand, and of spiritual escape, resistance, and renewal on the other—bears witness to a particular suicide: “Au bout du petit matin, le morne famélique et nul ne sait mieux que ce morne bâtard pourquoi le suicidé s’est étouffé avec complicité de son hypoglosse en retournant sa langue pour l’avaler” (1983, 36) [At the end of the wee hours, the famished morne and no one knows better than this bastard morne why the suicide choked with a little help from his hypoglossal jamming his tongue backward to swallow it] (37). In Solibo Magnifique, Solibo is struck down, choked from within, when the call and response play and constructive mimicry between the group of listeners and the conteur suddenly and permanently break down. Even though the night had been one during which the crowd vigorously answered his requests for response, a strange development takes place with the light of dawn. During a turn of phrase, Solibo hiccups and utters “Patat’ sa!” an utterance, according to the narrator, that does not exist in the conteur’s storytelling repertoire (Chamoiseau 1988, 34) but

Turning a Blind Eye 139

sounds like a response instead of a way of eliciting the crowd’s response. Meanwhile, to this cry of anguish, the crowd retorts an equally incomprehensible “Patat’ si!” thereby compounding the miscommunication and the distortion of the mimicry and play between conteur and listeners. This confusion embodies the community’s alienation. Afterward, Solibo’s lifeless body slides down between the exposed roots of the old tamarind tree from under which he had spoken that night and quickly succumbs to rigor mortis. The crowd attempts to revive the conteur but abandons its efforts knowing full well that the law will intervene as it always does at the slightest sign of death (39). The novel in fact begins with Évariste Pilon’s official police report detailing the state of Solibo’s corpse and its immediate surroundings. Yet, analogous to the function of La Estrella’s death in Cabrera Infante’s Tres tristes tigres, Solibo’s death in Chamoiseau’s novel is a foundational, discursive “event” that actualizes literary texts about absence and nostalgia, texts that in effect revive the conteur’s legacy precisely by continuing that legacy in writing. Solibo Magnifique, in other words, is the response to a call for the reinvigoration of oral traditions. In Éloge de la créolité, which was published a year after the novel, Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant promise to create a literature that would be faithful to the demands of modern writing at the same time that that writing would engage with their oral traditions (1993, 36). Accordingly, the new writing should also reveal a certain consciousness about the ways in which its authors inscribe themselves in the picture: The Creole poet writing in Creole, the Creole novelist writing in Creole, will have to be at once the collectors of ancestral speech, the gatherers of new words, and the discoverers of the Creoleness of Creole. They will mistrust this language while accepting it totally. They will keep a distance from it while plunging into it desperately—and, mistrusting the forms of defense-illustration, they will overwhelm this language with the eccentricities of their own chosen languages (1993, 106).16

The intellectual distancing and self-inscriptions that the authors propose with respect to Creole expression are those of archaeologists and discoverers. This approach is meant to eliminate the cultural alienation that has been caused by the relegation of the conteur to Martinique’s past. At the same time, the challenge to mistrust and accept this expression simultaneously is not only an attempt to transcend the difficulties of having to educate themselves about the “Creoleness of Creole” and,

140 Turning a Blind Eye

as legitimate bearers of the conteur’s art, of transforming that knowledge into writing; the challenge also provides them with the opportunity to reject narrative omniscience and position their voices self-consciously at the margins of the text just as the conteur had done through his strategies of self-effacement. Nicknamed “Chamzibié, Ti-Cham, or Oiseau de Cham,” Chamoiseau writes himself into his novel as just another character who witnesses Solibo’s death, a self-effacing figure, a mere word scribbler (“marqueur de paroles”) who, vis-à-vis the conteur’s tremendous powers of speech, recognizes his pathological obsession with words of all kinds, “même les plus inutiles” [even the most useless ones] (Chamoiseau 1988, 43). As a scribbler he is unable to discriminate valuable words from less significant ones. While Solibo was alive, Ti-Cham could only undertake his research on Creole expression in the marketplace with irregular progress for he would succumb to frequent bouts of asthma, a malady that inherently differentiated the conteur’s lungs from his. In privileging orality, the market community devalues Ti-Cham’s writing. As if they were simply bidding good day, market vendors would inquire, “Alors TiCham, écrire ça sert à quoi?” [Well then Ti-Cham, what good is writing?] (44), and Solibo would eventually warn Ti-Cham, saying that his pen will make him die silly (76). Eventually recognizing that he was nothing more than a parasite in the marketplace, Ti-Cham fantasizes that like Malinowski and other anthropologists he could try to formulate methods of “observation directe participante” [direct participatory observation] (44). Despite his naïveté, Ti-Cham ends up paying homage to Solibo in a self-empowering way: “Mystère sur mon devenir si le personnage de Solibo Magnifique n’avait réveillé ma vieille curiosité, me permettant ainsi, à travers lui, de retrouver une logique d’écriture” [What a mystery my future would be had Solibo Magnifique not awakened my old curiosity, thus allowing me, through him, to discover a logic of writing] (44; my translation). In his deposition on Solibo’s death, Ti-Cham admits that he knew the conteur without really knowing him but concludes that it was significant that he had been there for Solibo’s final words (170). This transfer of the power of the word from Solibo’s orality to Chamoiseau’s writing is nothing less than the aforementioned manifesto to create a new writing that would reclaim Creole oral traditions.17 This promise is discretely sealed in Ti-Cham’s dedication of his last book to Solibo. And reclamation is precisely what seems to be required. For

Turning a Blind Eye 141

if, in an effort to reveal the cause of the “crime,” state functionaries are responsible for having carried out a radical autopsy on Solibo’s corpse (the moribund body of Creole oral traditions), which they leave badly sutured (25–26) in their ignorance and contempt, then it falls upon the self-conscious Ti-Cham to make alternative sense of all that is left of the conteur: a mosaic of memories, his tales, his riddles, and his jokes about life and death (26). In the Name of the Law In this section, I examine how cultural alienation is configured in the novel through two competing visual regimes. The first regime belongs to the crowd (the throng) of participating listeners who are transformed from their traditional role as participating subjects in Solibo’s call and response performances into official witnesses who are obliged to give depositions about the “event” that the conteur’s death represents. In a critical essay on Bakhtin, Michael Gardiner argues that the shift from orality to the visual, from the spoken word’s “primordial richness, evocative power and directness” to the subsequent loss of these traits in cultures dominated by the visual, is indicative of a “historical transition to modernity” (1999, 63–64). However, the shift from participation to visual passivity in Solibo Magnifique is also a complex issue about neocolonial modernization. The crowd is caught unawares for it did not suspect that “en certaines circonstances et au nom de la Loi de simples écoutants de contes-cricraks devenaient des témoins” [in certain circumstances and in the name of the Law some simple listeners of cricrak tales would become witnesses] (Chamoiseau 1988, 29).18 The second visual regime is that of the police authorities who carry out their investigative work scrutinizing the place where Solibo’s corpse was found and safeguarding the site’s physical evidence at all costs. Because of its hegemonic function in the neocolonial state, this visual regime anxiously and violently forces the first one into a position in which its subjects must produce a legally credible discourse that would explain the “death” of local culture, that is to say, an explanation that would irrefutably finger the perpetrator of this enigmatic “crime.” The crowd is crucial for the development of the novel’s narrative structure. It is the presence of these listeners at Solibo’s last performance, their recollections of his place in the community, and their respective relationships with him that generate the novel’s discourse on

142 Turning a Blind Eye

the conteur’s cultural absence. For example, Ti-Cham, as I already mentioned, is the “marqueur de paroles” who writes down Solibo’s words; the drummer, Sucette, had accompanied the conteur’s performances; in a moment of tremendous fear and anxiety when all the witnesses are thrown into the police van, the sorbet vendor, Sidonise, seems to become possessed by Solibo’s voice; the old man, Congo, is the one who publicly and unhesitatingly announces that Solibo had succumbed to an “égorgette de la parole,” even though he himself is confounded by the occurrence; and, in her alarm, Doudou-Ménar, the candied fruit vendor, rushes to alert and usher in the authorities. This strategy, in which individual members of the throng either facilitate Solibo’s performances or gather fragments of the conteur’s oral tradition, also problematizes the notion of total collective alienation. Readers are introduced to the crowd in an excerpt from a police report. Of the fourteen individuals who were present when Solibo died, almost all are black and three of them are women. Generally, they share some common characteristics along three interrelated continuums. Most of them have official names but are more frequently known by their nicknames. (This practice is ubiquitous in the Caribbean and indicative of identities through which subjects meander between official and partially hidden public spaces.) Most of these individuals are unemployed or underemployed, and, finally, most of them live at approximate “addresses” such as “near the fountain” or “after the big canal behind the ravine,” signs that reveal that their marginalization is both economic and spatial (29–32). The police authorities are treated as an even less homogeneous group than Solibo’s throng of listeners. The subordinate officers, who are the first to come into contact with the public at large, are the most menacing and violently destructive characters in the novel. When Doudou-Ménar arrives at the police station, she is greeted by Justin Philibon, an officer who “darda sur Doudou-Ménar le regard qu’il croyait être celui de la justice” (49) [darted the glance at Doudou-Ménar that he thought pertinent to justice] and who typically calmed and dispatched excited individuals with his “masque de justice” (49) [mask of justice] and the officious manner in which he wielded his Waterman [pen]. Philibon, to whom the vendor refers repeatedly as “la Loi” [the Law], corrects DoudouMénar, stating that the law is legislated in France but he is a guardian of the peace (49–50).19 Unable to calm the vendor, a carnivalesque fracas ensues in which the station’s policemen physically attempt to subdue her.

Turning a Blind Eye 143

This treatment is just the first in a series of assaults on Doudou-Ménar. Other subordinate officers—such as Figaro Paul, who grew up being called Diab-Anba-Feuilles because of his legendary vindictiveness, and Salamer Cyprien, more familiarly known as Jambette, the one who keeps a knife hidden in his handkerchief—readily pursue violent means against her for the sake of law and order. For instance, after she returns with the police to the site where Solibo’s corpse lies, Doudou-Ménar moves away from the lineup of witnesses and refuses to step back. Reminding her of her conduct at the police station, Diab-Anba-Feuilles—with a murderous look in his eyes (91)—warns the candied fruit vendor: You you you don’t know me? Diab-Anba-Feuilles rages, if you don’t know me ask who I am, Devil, that’s what they call me, and I am a kind of sick shit, do you get that? a calamity, and if I start on you it will be until death do us part, I will die on top of you. . . . I have already filled thirteen tombs at Trabaut cemetery.20

At this point, the officer bites his fist, draws blood, and says to DoudouMénar that he has bled for her (93). His final move is to bring his club crashing down on the woman’s head in the most resounding blow in police records. The language that is employed to describe the police officers’ criminal conduct lies in stark contrast to that of the witnesses’ sympathetic recollections of Solibo. Early in the first section of the novel, an omniscient narrator laments that it would have preferred to use a language that rose to Solibo’s stature but, around his body, “la police deploya la mort obscure: l’injustice, l’humiliation, la méprise” (27) [the police effected an obscure death: injustice, humiliation, scorn]. Furthermore, the officer in charge condones this deployment of force. During the preliminary investigation at the scene of the “crime,” a group of firemen arrives only to be attacked and beaten by the subordinate police officers for having strayed into the guarded vicinity of Solibo’s corpse. Philémon Bouaffesse—the presiding officer and police chief—offers the French Republic’s apologies (96) and explains to the firemen, in a barely veiled threat, how the law functions should they wish to lodge a complaint: “[A]u nom du Code et de la République je dois vous expédier en geôle glouf! puisque vous avez voltigé les indices, mais je suis un gentil, nul n’est censé ignorer la loi mais la loi sort de France et quand elle arrive au pays, même si on la connaît, on n’est pas obligé de la re-connaître”

144 Turning a Blind Eye

(96–97) [In the name of the Code and of the Republic I should ship you off to the slammer seeing that you have muddled the clues, but I am kind, no one is supposed to ignore the law but the law comes out of France and when it arrives on the outskirts, even if you know it, you aren’t obliged to acknowledge it]. The nefarious activities of the local representatives of law and order contest the omniscient narrator’s efforts to honor and produce a written discourse worthy of the conteur’s oral tradition. At the same time, not only is the law repeatedly cited in the novel as having been distorted by the distance that its jurisdiction must cover from its place of origin in France but also, according to the novel, criminal elements also abound in the police force. In spite of Martinique’s departmentalization, this overcompensatory violence is further facilitated by authoritarian practices in which the officers’ methods scarcely differ from those that were used during slavery when the island had been a French colony. It is for this reason that when the witnesses are thrown into the police van the “odeur y réveille d’anciennes cicatrices” (109) [the odor stirs old scars], and their collective experience resembles that of being trapped and transported in a slave ship (121–22). Bouaffesse is also associated with those blacks who worked on the slave ships or on plantations whose role it was to ensure the system’s smooth functioning (58). Laws are written based on the assumption that the subjects who obey them are rational, fully visible actors whose actions are transparent and accountable. Yet as I have already commented, and Glissant’s Discours antillais consistently illustrates, opacity and lower-frequency politics inform Creole expression and subjectivities in Martinique and the rest of the Caribbean. One of the features that invokes these practices in the novel is the local population’s use of nicknames. I have already mentioned that the police officers, like the group of witnesses against whom they perpetrate acts of violence, possess official names and nicknames. Because both groups share this duplicity, it can be argued that they inhabit a common cultural field, in spite of the visual regimes with which they identify themselves. Notwithstanding, this duplicity is more deeply manifested within the police force’s rank and file. That Philibon wears a mask of justice is one such illustration of the duplicity. Another more detailed example in the novel is that of DiabAnba-Feuilles’s assault on Doudou-Ménar, which is described in ritualistic terms as if the officer had entered a trance or become possessed by

Turning a Blind Eye 145

something other than rage. Even after having delivered the resounding blow to the vendor’s head, Diab-Anba-Feuilles’s eyes roll back and his frothy mouth lets loose a stream of curses “dans un créole qu’il ne pouvait plus réprimer” (94) [in a Creole that he could no longer repress]. Alarmed by the officer’s behavior in public, Bouaffesse rebukes him, saying that “[l]e coup de saignement, c’est des manières de gros nègres, pas celles d’un agent de la force publique” (93) [the blood-letting is in keeping with the old-time negroes, not with a police officer]. As a last resort, the police chief reminds Diab-Anba-Feuilles about his other identity: “Dans l’occasion, il trompetta les grands moyens: l’état civil officiel de l’excité et un français-français (Monsieur Figaro Paul, siouplaît, dites donc là!), au son desquels Diab-Anba-Feuilles se statufia, et, s’il ne tremblait pas comme un chat empoisonné, je l’eusse décrit: immobile” (95) [For the occasion, he brought out the big guns: the crazed man’s official civil status and a true true Frenchman (Mr. Figaro Paul, ifyouplease, come on!), to the sound of which Diab-Anba-Feuilles froze, and, were he not quivering like a poisoned cat, I might have described him as immobile]. This episode not only reveals facets of the double croyance that maintains the neocolonial order intact, but it also illustrates the ease with which “proper” French can be deployed to uphold the authorities’ mask of cynical reason, the same “reason” that allows them to sanction the violence that they wreak on the state’s “witnesses.” Reminding Diab-AnbaFeuilles that he is also French is sufficient to bring his attack to an immediate halt and subordinate him once more to Bouaffesse’s command. Moreover, while the social antagonism between the police and the witnesses is constructed as polarized subjectivities, the neocolonial state exacerbates the officers’ duplicity even further by placing them in a position to deploy shared cultural practices against the very communities that give rise to them. It is in this light that Diab-Anba-Feuilles’s recourse to Creole and his trancelike conduct can be explained. In the neocolonial context in which most of these subjects inhabit partially hidden public spaces and systematically practice lower-frequency politics, the demand for “rationality” and full visibility under the law is made by local authorities wearing a mask of cynical reason. After all the witnesses’ depositions proffer similar accounts of Solibo’s death, Bouaffesse is adamant, in spite of the facts, that “on avait tué!” [there had been a killing!] and that the story about the “égorgette de la parole” is proof that the witnesses are not telling the truth (104).

146 Turning a Blind Eye

The witnesses pay a severe price for the masks of cynical reason that the police authorities wear. For example, Congo, the witness who most recalls the traditions of Afro-Creole speech and culture on the island, becomes Bouaffesse’s primary murder suspect. Sympathetically portrayed in the novel, Congo is associated with an eclipsed past. The narrator draws attention to the old man’s “silhouette anachronique” (204) [anachronistic silhouette] and to his earlier practices of resistance (strikes, theft, etc.) to the colonial order (201–4). Without participating in carnival, tourists and spectators believe, like Goodman did when he came across a blackened negro figure in Santiago de Cuba’s carnival, that Congo is disguised (205). In order to extract a confession from the old man, the police chief and others threaten, abuse, and torture him. The first method that Bouaffesse recruits is that of language: “Afin de coincer ce vieux nègre vicieux, il fallait le traquer au français. Le français engourdit leur tête, grippe leur vicerie, et ils dérapent comme des rhumiers sur les dalles de pavé” (105) [In order to corner this vicious old negro, it would be necessary to trap him with French. French numbs their brains, snatches hold of their evil, and they drop like rum-drinkers on the sidewalk]. When this tactic does not work, the police resort to physical violence. Eventually, Congo commits suicide by throwing himself (“s’envola”) from a window in the police station (208). The use of the word “s’envoler” [to take flight] is not arbitrary. It alludes to the way in which slaves associated this kind of suicide with the flight of a bird returning home and, hence, of the spirit of the African back to Africa. The allusion once again draws an analogy between the contemporary period of violence and that of slavery. Nevertheless, the relationship that best illustrates the dangerous consequences of the police authorities’ cynicism is that of Bouaffesse and Doudou-Ménar. The authorities expend tremendous efforts attempting to keep DoudouMénar at bay. Apart from the fracas at the police station in which all the officers present assault her and the blow that Diab-Anba-Feuilles delivers to her head, the candied fruit vendor returns to the scene of Solibo’s death, after the firemen had rushed her off to the hospital, and wreaks vengeance on her attacker with “la rage d’un gendarme à cheval dans une grève agricole” (132) [the rage of a mounted guard in an agricultural strike]. Clearly, Doudou-Ménar’s superhuman strength, presence, and plasticity recall Códac’s hyperbolic descriptions of Estrella in Tres tristes tigres. The narrator refers to the candied fruit vendor as a “femme

Turning a Blind Eye 147

à scandale en cinémascope (et couleurs par Deluxe)” (62) [scandalous woman in cinemascope (colors by Deluxe)] and describes her habits as her usual cinemascope (97). The narrator also calls her “L’Énorme,” “La Grosse” (50) [the Enormous one, the Hefty one], and when the police attack her she is transformed from mad dog to “La Sauvage” (51) [the Wild One] and from “La Redoubtable” [the Scary One] to “L’Enragée” [the Furious One] (132). In a Bakhtinian sense, the vendor incarnates the transgressive character and carnivalesque unruliness of the popular urban marketplace—that public site of free speech that the neocolonial state and its officials attempt to regulate and, in this case, that they also scorn.21 When she returns to the site where Solibo’s body lies, she is escorted by policemen: “Entre les uniformes de police, elle fait irruption dans une existence légitime, elle comprend avoir vécu comme nous tous, en décalage, sur ces sentiers qui tracent un autre pays que les routes coloniales. Alors il faut comprendre: dans le car qui roule vers Solibo et nous, Doudou-Ménar, légalisée, est fière” (67) [Between the police uniforms, she bursts in on legitimacy, she knows what it means to have lived like all of us, slipping, on these paths that trace a place other than the colonial roads. So one must understand: in the van cruising toward Solibo and us, Doudou-Ménar, legalized, sits proud]. According to the police’s list of witnesses, however, Doudou-Ménar’s official name is Lolita Boidevan. And it is by this name that Bouaffesse, as a young officer, had met and briefly courted the young girl. The promise that they made never to forget each other is called forth only when, in the middle of the fracas in the police station, Bouaffesse approaches the scene and Doudou-Ménar asks: “Tu ne me reconnais pas, Philémon?” (59) [Don’t you recognize me, Philémon?]. Recalling their brief affair, the police chief replies: “Je vous reconnais, madame, rejoignez mon bureau” (64) [I’ll take care of you, madam, step into my office]. Even though Bouaffesse recognizes the vendor, his response is decidedly cold and aloof. In this manner, he does not demask himself nor leave room for the possibility of a nonhierarchical exchange between market woman and police chief. Later, it is Bouaffesse who, in an uncharacteristic moment of tenderness, finally says to Doudou-Ménar: “Lolita, Lolita, c’est Philémon” (136) [Lolita, Lolita, it’s Philémon]. But by that time the subordinate officers had already beaten her to death for avenging herself against Diab-Anba-Feuilles. As if to underscore that his ideological mask is indeed one of profound cynicism, the police chief eventually

148 Turning a Blind Eye

and briefly demasks himself and responds to the vendor’s call for recognition. But by then it is already too late for them to “recognize” each other behind his ideological mask and her “cinemascope.” When Solibo’s autopsy reveals that the witnesses had been telling the truth—that “ce monsieur Magnifique aurait donc été étranglé de l’interieur (215) [this mister Magnifique must have been strangled from the inside]—the police chief and Évariste Pilon, the detective who files the police report, begin to ponder the enigma outside the state’s official demand for rationality and the absolute transparency of “truth”: “Après s’être demandé avec peu d’éléments: Qui a tué Solibo? . . . il se retrouvait disponible devant l’autre question: Qui, mais qui était ce Solibo, et pourquoi «Magnifique»?” (219) [After having asked himself with little to go on: Who killed Solibo? . . . he discovered himself willing to take on another question: Who, but who was this Solibo, and why “Magnifique”?]. Outside the limits and requirements of the law, Bouaffesse and Pilon are free to undertake the introspection and self-demasking that the case required but that they could not risk in the positions of authority that they assumed. Curiously, this new awareness resonates in Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant’s Éloge de la créolité when they write that interior vision is revealing, therefore revolutionary. To learn again how to visualize our depths. To learn again how to look positively at what revolves around us. Interior vision defeats, first of all, the old French imagery we are covered with, and restores us to ourselves in a mosaic renewed by the autonomy of its components, their unpredictability, their now mysterious resonances. (1993, 86)22

That it is enough to possess only the fragments of the whole is also a lesson that Bouafesse and Pilon learn to appreciate. They attempt to investigate and comprehend Solibo’s name and discover that no one knew where he had lived nor had a global view of him: “Solibo était semblable à un reflet de vitrine, une sculpture à facettes dont aucun angle n’autorisait une perspective d’ensemble” (220) [Solibo was something like a reflection on a show window, a faceted sculpture no angle of which permitted a vision of the whole]. The conclusion that the fragmentary and the ephemeral capture the conteur’s essence lies in stark contrast to the authorities’ prior demand for visible, irrefutable facts. No longer required to turn a blind eye on the ways in which they contribute to the “death” of local culture, no longer obliged to work against that culture

Turning a Blind Eye 149

in the name of the law, Pilon and Bouaffesse liberate themselves enough to admit through constructive introspection—a return to the place of entanglement, as Glissant might put it—that “toute cette histoire n’a pas de sens!” (217) [this whole story makes no sense!]. Chamoiseau’s novel cannot be reduced to an attempt at seeking sympathy for Creole orality and the conteur or at voicing a lament about the irreparable loss of local popular culture in the face of a hegemonic Francité or Frenchness. Given the internal contradiction of a society that in effect (and with hindsight) consented to its neocolonial circumstances by means of a plebiscite, Solibo’s death articulates the necessarily “nonsensical” nature of a crime against local popular culture. From the state’s purview—the source of the demand for the rationality and exercise of French law and order in the novel—Solibo’s death defies common sense because the fatal égorgette de la parole to which he succumbed provides no external clues about the perpetrator of and motive for the “crime.” Although the absence of such clues ultimately thwarts the state’s investigations, it successfully reveals the pervasive and perversely mundane invisibility of neocolonial ideology. This invisibility, in other words, functions as an imposed or institutionalized blindness that subsequently gets internalized by those who are officially assigned to bring this blindness to bear on the “clues.” In this manner, French neocolonialism turns a blind eye with respect to its own role in the demise of Martinican popular culture; it produces a blindness that it aims to conserve in the form of its mask of cynical reason. I am referring not to a neocolonialism that depends solely on the postdepartmentalization presence of French authorities on the island, especially since not a single French character makes an appearance in the novel, but to an exercise in cultural hegemony in which Martinican authorities cultivate, perpetuate, and sometimes violently wield their need to be French. Hence, Bouafesse’s insistence that a crime had been committed ventriloquizes the state’s anxiety to throw the investigators off its track so that they will not discover the role that it played in the death of the conteur; the insistence also allows the local authorities to avoid demasking their own reinforcement of French cultural hegemony. The admission that the story makes no sense is even more disconcerting for those who helplessly witnessed Solibo’s death. It might be certain that the distance that separates a modern-day conteur-novelist like Chamoiseau and the population for and through whom he “speaks” is

150 Turning a Blind Eye

less than the one that the poetic voice assumes vis-à-vis the chattering but alienated “throng” in Césaire’s poem. But despite the humor and levity that characterize some of the novel’s episodes and descriptions and in spite of the narrator’s recourse to “traditional” strategies of selfeffacement in order to give his self-conscious, writerly interventions the opacity of lower-frequency politics, Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magnifique still paints a pessimistic portrait of cultural alienation in Martinican society. As is the case with Cabrera Infante’s Tres tristes tigres, it is possible to read Chamoiseau’s novel as an example of a postmodern aesthetic in which the conteur’s subjectivity is perpetually made partially available through enunciated fragments and through a writerly self-consciousness in which the struggle and failure of the written word to capture speech is repeatedly highlighted. However, the indication that the story makes no sense is less a display of an aesthetic sensibility than a profound self-indictment about the failure of a community to recognize and communicate the value of its own cultural traditions. Nobody in this community—not the authorities who guard themselves against piecing together the facts (and exacerbate their violence by leaving Solibo’s body badly sutured after the autopsy) nor the crowd that gathered, unbeknownst to them, to bear witness forcibly to the demise of their own cultural traditions—is able to make sense of Solibo’s story and death. The failure to do so is directly proportional to a cultural alienation in which the bearers of masks of cynical reason and the practitioners of lower-frequency politics coincide in their mutual nonrecognition. The two chapters that compose this section of the book investigate the ways in which language can be employed by the choteador and the conteur not to make social relations transparent and, hence, cognitively accessible but to obfuscate them so that distinctions can be drawn between cultural “insiders” and “outsiders.” The historical experiences of colonialism in the region led to the liberating possibilities of these “invisible” and perennially shifting linguistic and semantic fences. Yet, in spite—or maybe because—of the region’s assumption of various models of self-government, cultural “outsiders” are not necessarily limited to foreigners but include locals who have tangible economic and social investments in maintaining their masks of cynical reason, consciously or not, vis-à-vis their own cultures. It is in this light that we can perhaps best explain Códac’s second look and his agenda to “discover” Estrella’s

Turning a Blind Eye 151

talent and the Martinican authorities’ desire to conserve their social status by wielding and violently perpetrating their notions of Frenchness. Whereas the first section of this book concentrated on the material representations of masks and masking practices so that opportunities for demasking are made available by observing and critiquing socioeconomic and constitutional pressures on these practices, the task of demasking ideological agendas in language is more complex. It is not that language possesses a significantly less material existence than the masks and masking practices that I have examined in this study. Rather, since the emergence of self-government in the region, it is the daily and ubiquitous use of native or indigenized linguistic practices by locals, regardless of their color and class and across a broader and now more socially flexible continuum of linguistic registers, that makes it difficult to identify ideological and cultural positions and the ways in which they might be masked. Even though these complexities provide challenges of the kind that cause Aldrick to proffer his sincerely stated “I don’t know,” and Pilon and Bouaffesse to confess their soul-searching “this entire story makes no sense,” demasking the means by which private interests get promoted as collective or national will still remain a straightforward critical task.

This page intentionally left blank

Notes

Introduction 1. For a description and analysis of the relationship between philosophy and religion in African philosophies and the continuity of that relationship in AfroCaribbean philosophies, consult the first chapter in Paget Henry’s Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2000). 2. Some of Wilson’s categories of analysis are also to be found in Roberto DaMatta’s seminal 1979 study of Brazilian carnival, Carnivals, Rogues, and Heroes: An Interpretation of the Brazilian Dilemma, trans. John Drury (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991). Wilson’s study has begun to stimulate critical attention once again, but this time in literary and cultural studies where, despite its somewhat dated discourse and politics, it is being reassessed. See, for example, Richard D. E. Burton, Afro-Creole: Power, Opposition, and Play in the Caribbean (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 158–63; and Peter van Koningsbruggen, Trinidad Carnival: A Quest for National Identity (London: Macmillan Education, 1997), chapter 5. 3. Canboulay (from the French “cannes brûlées”) refers to those periods of liberation from the daily routines of slavery when slaves, who were brought in from neighboring plantations to extinguish nocturnal fires in the sugarcane fields, took the opportunity to communicate and socialize among themselves. These events involved dramatic and ritualized parodies of plantation life and later became integral parts of the opening of carnival celebrations. Within the Canboulay processions, authorities most feared the torches that revelers used in their nightly festivities. For more information about Canboulay and the Canboulay Riots, consult Abner Cohen, Carnival, Canboulay, and Calypso: Caribbean Traditions in the Making (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Koningsbruggen (1997, 9–35). 4. This situation was more complicated than the typical high versus low culture juxtaposition that is frequently employed to explain confrontations between colonial authorities and carnival and popular cultural practices. The heavy-handed British colonial reaction to carnival practices in the island at that time was one attempt among 153

154 Notes many to anglicize Trinidad when the French Creole elite and their colored servants and workers constituted the dominant linguistic, commercial, and social group. 5. Ramchand’s conceptualization of the “veil” and “veiling” is helpful for understanding contemporary carnival masking practices, especially those in which carnival bands, like samba schools in Brazil, tend to be constituted of revelers from similar backgrounds and persuasions. David Theo Goldberg posits veiling in a light that I also find compelling. He writes that “veiling renders black people invisible” and that “the process of unveiling involves ‘humanizing’ black people in the face of their being ‘racialized’” (1996, 184). 6. It would be erroneous to suggest that Césaire’s position is as clear-cut as this. In Clifford Geertz’s analysis of the epistemology of the “native’s point of view,” he explains that the “experience-near” discourse of the native and the “experience-distant” discourse of the specialist are neither absolute nor polarized categories of knowledge and that it is not unusual, for instance, for the native to make use of experience-near concepts “spontaneously” and “unself-consciously” (1983, 57–58). In my reading of Césaire’s poem, I focus on the process in which the native poet describes how he became aware of an “outsideness” that he had unreflexively internalized. 7. It is noteworthy that in Black Orpheus, originally Jean-Paul Sartre’s introduction to the first anthology of négritude poets in 1948, he begins his discussion with a reflection on the experience of having a black collective gaze cast on white men: “Here, in this anthology, are black men standing, black men who examine us; and I want you to feel, as I, the sensation of being seen. . . . Today, these black men have fixed their gaze upon us and our gaze is thrown back in our eyes” (n.d., 7–8). 8. For an analysis of this distinction, consult Ryan’s “Contested Vision/DoubleVision in Tar Baby” (Modern Fiction Studies 39, no. 3/4 [1993]: 597–621). 9. A case in point is the manner in which Lacan associates the gaze with “the presence of others as such,” that is, with an abstraction that provides little critical room to interrogate the gaze’s social constitution and interiorized antagonisms (see Silverman 1996, 131–32). Following Silverman’s lead, I have already been using the term “collective gaze” and will continue to posit the gaze as such throughout this study. 10. This summary of Naipaul’s attitude should not be taken at face value. Stephano Harney proposes and convincingly shows that there is a “politics of misreading Naipaul” based on a distortion of the latter’s views, as well as on the refusal to acknowledge the complicity of locals who practice the oppression of ordinary people in postcolonial societies (1996, 144–65). Walcott’s essay focuses on and elaborates specific statements by the novelist and also illustrates on what points he agrees with Naipaul. For example, Walcott concurs with the novelist’s opinion that the postcolonial politicians’ “mimicry of power defrauds their own people” (1993, 52). 11. Lacan’s statement that mimicry reveals an “itself that is behind” suggests that the “something” that it reveals just might be a mask. Even though I do not want to discard this possibility, it does not seem to me that “mask,” as Lacan describes it, captures the degree of assertiveness that he associates with mimicry—which is not to say that the mask and mimicry are not related in Lacan’s theories of visual perception. “Man, in effect,” he writes, “knows how to play with the mask as that beyond which there is a gaze” (1981, 100). The most suggestive idea in all of this, however, is the way in which the notion of an itself that is behind posits a particular simultaneity within an identity and subject position. Mimicry, in this sense, is an activity that incorporates both the something and the “itself ” behind.

Notes 155

1. Dispossession, Nonpossession, and Self-Possession 1. The word mas’ resembles the term for the Catholic religious service, “mass,” but is mostly derived from the French masque. “To play mas’” may be taken literally to mean to participate in carnival or figuratively to imply confusion, casualness, or deception. Official celebrations of carnival were introduced into the Spanish island of Trinidad by French colonists. The first wave of these planters and their slaves came mainly from Grenada, Guadeloupe, and Martinique and were permitted by Spanish law to settle the island; the second wave came mostly from Saint Domingue (Haiti) after the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 (Anthony 1989, 1–2). This plantocracy indulged annually in elaborate and fancy masked balls to celebrate through carnival the farewell to flesh and the beginning of the fasting period that the Catholic observance of Lent demanded. From its inception, carnival was directly and indirectly prescribed by legal and religious codes and sanctions. With emancipation in 1838, the bulk of the festivities shifted from the “cultural officialdom” of the planters’ residences, and the slaves’ versions of these balls that were often combined with various African rituals in backyards at night, to the streets where ex-slaves participated in great numbers, sometimes taking advantage of their masks to settle scores or verbally abuse the authorities (5). 2. I will call this mask “traditional” because Lovelace conceptualizes it in the first half of the novel as both an unproblematic coherence and the object of nostalgia by Calvary Hill’s principal rebels. 3. This aesthetic fascination with the devil is not peculiar to Trinidad and Tobago’s carnival alone. Rowe and Schelling point out that the focus on devils in Latin America frequently represents not only “a negotiation of modernity but also a criticism of it” (1991, 72). 4. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 5. In her reading of the novel, Paravisini-Gebert correctly asserts that Aldrick’s revolt is an extension of his dragon dance. Yet she fails to valorize the political significance of improvisation—of purposefully not adhering to a plan—for the rebels and ends up underscoring their “unpreparedness to wield a power they had never really possessed and had never adequately imagined” (1997, 220). 6. According to Michael Anthony, pretty mas’ began to assume greater visibility in the streets beginning in the 1920s with the unofficial activities of the Carnival Improvement Committee (1989, 72). I will turn to this subject in greater detail in chapter 2. 7. For Daniel Miller, this may be the reason why the revolt may be considered “much clearer about what it was opposing than about what it was hoping to construct” (1997, 191).

2. The New Visibilities 1. In Trinidad, the term “Creole” has historically been used to refer to Trinidadian whites and on occasion mulattos, and “French Creole” to describe the descendants of the nineteenth-century French plantocracy. “Creole” has also been employed to mean not of Indo-Trinidadian ancestry. I use “Creole” in a wide sense to

156 Notes refer to these groups and specifically to the continuum of the colored urban population that participates in carnival annually. “Creole” today, as one would expect in such a racially heterogeneous society, encompasses a wide color spectrum. Also see Miller (1997, 51). 2. Building or simply even arguing for new permanent structures for the annual carnival competitions at the Queen’s Park Savannah continues to be very controversial today. The Savannah is a large expanse of open land with football and cricket facilities that are free for public use. It was ceded to the city of Port of Spain on the condition that no permanent structures be erected there. For the city’s inhabitants, the legal stipulations against construction and the private ownership of any piece of this valuable real estate have transformed the Savannah into a symbolic triumph of public rights over real estate speculation. Permanently paving access to the Savannah’s grandstand, which occurred in 1999, brought protesters into the street. 3. I am in agreement with Stallybrass and White that it is necessary to steer clear of apocalyptic or nostalgic readings that signal the disappearance of carnival as an inevitability in the face of modernization (1986, 195–96). My analysis, however, names the principal agents involved in the modern, internal transformations of the national festival. 4. Koningsbruggen draws his conceptualization of middle-classization from the work of S. B. MacDonald, Trinidad and Tobago: Democracy and Development in the Caribbean (New York: Praeger Scientific, 1986); and G. K. Lewis, “The Contemporary Caribbean: A General Overview,” in Caribbean Contours, ed. S. W. Mintz and S. Price (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). Following these leads, I do not consider the middle class a static, bordered entity; analogous to the racial diversity that I mentioned with respect to defining “Creole,” class is a similarly porous and unstable category. I base my references to the middle class on a flexible and dynamic notion of subscription to a cultural politics of middle-classization. 5. By most accounts, jamet referred to individuals, male and female, who around 1860 were considered to live below the diamètre of respectability. Koningsbruggen emphasizes that “the majority of the working class did not belong to the Jamets and probably did not approve of their way of life either” (1997, 33). Jamet, therefore, designated an underworld of petty criminals, prostitutes, and lumpenproletariat who lived on the margins of the capital where temporary work could be had. In any case, they were notorious for their fights and obscenity, especially at carnival time. Similar discussions have been generated in the case of Brazilian samba. See Rowe and Schelling for a study of the history of samba and its transformations in sites and participants as the dance form moved from rural areas during the colonial period to the country’s most important urban centers today (1991, 122–38). Rowe and Schelling’s analysis, however, focuses on establishing connections between samba and Afro-Brazilian spirituality in the early period and on the dance performance’s contact with culture industry in more recent times. 6. Minshall’s references to the European avant-garde are, of course, based on his knowledge of modern Western art. Sampath, in a related area of inquiry, employs the term “surreal” to qualify the “sensory” and “destination” images that work to produce a satisfying contrast for the tourist (who is frequently a Trinidadian residing abroad) between his or her identity and a “foreign” identity (1997, 149). He also points out that “the fascination of the now rather surreal tourist-attraction images can become equally powerful to the host population. The difference is that, for

Notes 157 the hosts, the images have become parallel globalising variables of local identity, rather than the variables of contrasting foreign exotica that they are for the guests” (152). 7. In Felix Paul’s article, “Leroy Laments the Way We Treat Mas’” (Trinidad Guardian, September 30, 1997), Minshall maintains the same view about the cultural uniqueness of the island. Paraphrasing the mas’ man, Paul writes: “Minshall . . . seemed convinced that Trinidad and Tobago has something that is not only unique, but also powerful enough to transcend colour, creed, race, and even be used as a political tool.” Also, Paul continues, “Minshall feels that a ‘tiny island,’ which was once colonised, is now recolonising bigger cities like Notting Hill and Brooklyn, with mas’ taken from these shores.” It is important to inject some historical perspective here. Carnivals in these metropoles began because working-class West Indian immigrants organized these initially nostalgic events. NCC activities in exporting carnival and in thus providing a transnational infrastructure for the national festival are the result of very recent cultural politics introduced into these communities “from above.” 8. The hummingbird is one of Trinidad and Tobago’s national birds. Trinidad’s Amerindian name, Iere, means “Land of the Hummingbird.” 9. In “Where Do We Go from Here?” Minshall lists some of the accusations that have been brought against him in the public sphere: “They have called me a cult leader. They say I have a power over people. They railed against this white man, who lives in a white house putting all those black people in white. . . . They said that I deal in obeah. Now they say that I am a worshipper of Satan” (1989, 4). 10. In the fieldwork that he carried out at the end of the 1980s, Miller noticed this gender distinction: “[w]hen the soca started to play most of the male youths simply stood still, while a minority of women really let go and danced with an abandon that I had only occasionally seen previously. The men came back in only when the DJs included some of the more familiar rap and dub sounds” (1997, 124). This is an important distinction to which I will return later. 11. Zammee is derived from the French les amies. Koningsbruggen also reports the frequency of this statement among some men (1997, 82). 12. Citing a parallel study that took place in 1995, Sampath reports that in an Internet discussion group between an unnamed anthropologist and some middleclass, expatriate Trinidadian women, the latter reacted negatively to the former’s suggestion that in representing Trinidadianness to the world through carnival, winin’ women were more acceptable for tourists than rebellious working-class males (1997, 165). The women, “still representative of the conservative élite that participates in carnival,” were hostile to the ideas that they were being denied a role in “rebellion,” that they were not free and were being used, and that they were essentially there for the tourists (165–66). Undeniably, there is a consensus among Trinidadian women who participate in carnival, regardless of their income, that they do contribute to a utopian, albeit transient, celebration of their “freedom” and “independence.” Nevertheless, it is crucial to interrogate the technologies of visibility that are placed at the disposal of only some of these women during carnival. 13. This trend is not only “cultural.” In her analysis of Trinidad and Tobago’s Sexual Offences Bill (1986), Jacqui Alexander also implies that greater economic independence among black middle-class wives may be a contributing factor in the bill’s institutionalization of morality.

158 Notes 14. What I have not been able to pursue here is the annually voiced complaints by some calypsonians and soca artists that there exists a “soca mafia” that controls whose music receives exposure on the radio waves. There is also a general perception that direct and indirect government censorship in many of the activities that the NCC manages is also at work throughout the festival’s organization.

3. Specularity and the Language of Corpulence 1. The term criollo was first employed during the colonial period to describe the Spaniard who was born in the Americas. Subsequently, it located that mostly white, intermediary group in class and social privileges below Spaniards born in the Peninsula and above the free and enslaved colored populations. During the contemporary period, and depending on the region, criollo signals autochthonous provenance and, in some nation-building discourses, is less associated with ethnicity than with cultural authenticity. 2. Delafosse wrote L’âme nègre in 1922. Frobenius wrote Histoire de la civilisation africaine in German in 1898, and it was published in French in 1936. For more complete information about the history of this scholarship, consult Belinda Jack, Francophone Literatures: An Introductory Survey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 3. Despite the privileged status of European scholarship among the region’s writers, artists, and intellectuals, this emerging discourse was criticized as a transient, European fashion. See, for instance, the debate that Palés Matos’s articles, “Hacia una poesía antillana” (237–42) and “El arte y la raza blanca” (229–32), in Luis Palés Matos: Obras, 1914–1959, vol. 2 (Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1984), inspired in his colleague, J. I. de Diego Padró, who responded with two of his own: “Antillanismo, Criollismo, Negroidismo” (93–97) and “Tropicalismo, Occidentalismo, sentido de la cultura” (109–21), in J. I. de Diego Padró, Luis Palés Matos y su trasmundo poético (Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Puerto, 1973). For an Afro-centered critical history of this discourse, consult Josaphat Kubayanda, The Poet’s Africa: Africanness in the Poetry of Aimé Césaire and Nicolás Guillén (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990). Robin Moore’s Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920–1940 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997) provides a basic account of this period in Cuba. 4. “Que la Universidad se pinte de negro, de mulato, de obrero, de campesino,” a speech delivered at the Universidad de las Villas, December, 28, 1959, and reproduced in Ernesto Che Guevara: Obras escogidas 1957–1967 (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1991). The call for racial diversification and proletarianization of intellectual institutions by both Guevara and Fidel Castro created a politicized intellectual climate in which seminal works such as Miguel Barnet’s Biografía de un cimarrón (1968) and Roberto Fernández Retamar’s Calibán (1972) could be written and disseminated throughout Latin America as revolutionary scholarship. 5. Guillén wrote “El camino de Harlem,”“La conquista del blanco,” and “El blanco: He ahí el problema” in 1929. See Nicolás Guillén, Prosa de prisa 1929–1972, vol. 1 (Havana: Editorial Arte y Literatura, 1975). 6. For a description of the psychological impact of the “black peril” on colonial authorities, see Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the

Notes 159 Postmodern Perspective (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992), 100–107 and 121–22. 7. On this subject, consult Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). 8. The word choteo is usually associated with Cuba. A more general term for it in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean is relajo. The best study of the practice is Jorge Mañach’s Indagación del choteo (1928). Since I will discuss this essay in greater detail later, suffice it to say for the time being that Mañach describes choteo as both a verbal performance and an attitude toward life. 9. Footage from PM appears as a backdrop to the credits at the close of Julien Schnabel’s 2000 adaptation of Reinaldo Arenas’s posthumous autobiography, Antes que anochezca [Before night falls] (1992). 10. “Neo-Baroque” is a term that has been used to describe Tres tristes tigres and the literary production of a relatively wide selection of Cuban (and Latin American) novelists and poets. It is a literary style that tends to be associated with Cuban literature and that has received a good deal of critical attention. There is, I believe, sufficient evidence to suggest that choteo and the category of the neo-Baroque in Cuban literary history share common ground. For more information on the neoBaroque, see William Siemens, “Rayas extravagantes: Tres tristes tigres y el neobarroco cubano,” Revista Iberoamericana 57, no. 154 (1991): 235–43. 11. Pues allá en el centro del chowcito estaba ahora la gorda vestida con un vestido barato, de una tela carmelita cobarde que se confundía con el chocolate de su piel chocolate y unas sandalias viejas, malucas, y un vaso en la mano, moviéndose al compás de la música, moviendo las caderas, todo su cuerpo de una manera bella, no obscena pero sí sexual y bellamente, meneándose a ritmo, canturreando por entre los labios aporreados, sus labios gordos y morados, a ritmo, agitando el vaso a ritmo, rítmicamente, bellamente, artísticamente y el efecto total era de una belleza tan distinta, tan horrible, tan nueva que lamenté no haber llevado la cámara para haber retratado aquel elefante que bailaba ballet, aquel hipopótamo en punta, aquel edificio movido por la música y le dije a Irenita, antes de preguntarle el nombre, interrumpiéndome cuando preguntaba el nombre, Es la salvaje belleza de la vida, sin que me oyera naturalmente, sin que me entendiera si me había oído, naturalmente y le dije, le pregunté, Quién es, tú. (67) 12. According to Iris M. Zavala, “the bolero plays with the signs of gender; in a song the body, however focused, distorted or stretched out, is the main referent among the vertiginous accumulation of symbolic games with eroticism” (1997, 192). 13. Silverman agrees in part with Lacan’s use of this phrase to account for the gaze’s ahistorical character. However, she also argues that the gaze varies according to epoch and culture in at least three dimensions of the field of vision: “these variations pertain to how the gaze is apprehended; how the world is perceived; and how the subject experiences his or her visibility” (1996, 134). 14. The period when Mañach published this study was also characterized by other similar valorizations of the popular in order to posit new definitions of Cuban national culture in the face of U.S. economic hegemony. In 1928, the conservative Diario de la Marina, arguably Cuba’s most influential newspaper, began Ideales de la Raza, a Sunday supplement devoted to broaching issues of race and culture in Cuba. It was here from 1928 to 1930 that Guillén first published some of his denunciations of racism, as well as some of the poems that were later compiled in his

160 Notes groundbreaking book of poems Motivos de son (1930). The son musical form, as Robin Moore points out in his study Nationalizing Blackness, was the first popular one of humble origins—both from the countryside and from urban Havana—that broke onto the national cultural scene. Langston Hughes and Federico García Lorca also met and began correspondence with Guillén at this time. Mañach himself was one of several key figures who, under Fernando Ortiz’s guidance, began to turn their attention to local manifestations of culture, and it is in this light that his intellectual discomfort in Indagación del choteo must be understood. 15. By contrast, a technique similar to Freud’s notion of the hostile or obscene joke exists in the choteador’s repertoire: “A veces, su procedimiento es el de la diatriba: se limita a ir desvistiendo a su víctima, despojándola, una a una, de todas las prendas en que se cifra su vanidad o su gravedad” [Sometimes, his procedure is that of the diatribe: he focuses on exposing his victim, stripping him or her, one by one, of all the wrappings in which his or her vanity or seriousness is encoded] (1969, 70). 16. Me acerqué y le pregunté quien era y me dijo, La Estrella, y yo le dije, No, no, su nombre, y ella me dijo, La Estrella, yo soy la Estrella, niño, y soltó una carcajada profunda de barítono o como se llame la voz de mujer que corresponde al bajo pero que suena a barítono, contralto o cosa así, y me dijo sonriendo, Me llamo Estrella, Estrella Rodríguez para servirle, me dijo y me dije, Es negra, negra, negra, totalmente negra, y empezamos a hablar y pensé que qué país más aburrido sería éste si no hubiera existido el padre las Casas y le dijo, Te bendigo, cura, por haber traído negros del Africa como esclavos para aliviar la esclavitud de los indios que de todas maneras ya se estaban acabando, y le dije otra vez a Estrella yo la amo a usted, y ella se rió a caracajadas. (1994, 68) 17. In Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s, Daphne Duval Harrison examines how blues singers in the United States managed their careers, private lives, and negotiations with a recording industry that prospered from their talent. According to Harrison, the blues queens were talented and ambitious, and even though this combination was not always harmonious, it still seemed to benefit the artists’ performances at some level: “The tension between private and public behavior was everpresent to temper and constrain the outburst of volatile personalities such as Bessie Smith. Yet it was that tension that also gave her and Rainey that soulful expressiveness that makes their music immortal and memorable” (1990, 55).

4. Turning a Blind Eye in the Name of the Law 1. See Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: Currey, 1986). 2. For the quotes translated into English from the original French text, I have used Caribbean Discourse (1992), J. Michael Dash’s translation of Glissant’s Le discours antillais. I have quoted from the 1997 edition of the latter. 3. Helen Hintjens writes that “[t]he paradox is that virtually no political groupings in the French Caribbean want full sovereignty without a continuing attachment to France.” The debate, she continues, “is less about constitutional and political status . . . and more about the use to which the present political institutions are put, and the degree of autonomy from the central administration in Paris” (1995, 31). Fred Reno observes that workshops to “fight against alienation” were introduced for all Martinicans (1995, 43) and that from 1981 to 1990, “it appears that de-

Notes 161 pendence on terms of the French state was fully utilized as a resource by all the political actors of the left and the right” (45). 4. “Ma bouche sera la bouche des malheurs qui n’ont point de bouche, ma voix, la liberté de celles / qui s’affaissent au cachot du désespoir.” / Et venant je me dirais à moi-même: / “Et surtout mon corps aussi bien que mon âme, gardez-vous de vous croiser les bras en l’attitude / stérile du spectateur, car la vie n’est pas un spectacle, car une mer de douleurs n’est pas un proscenium, / car un homme qui crie n’est pas un ours qui danse.” (44) 5. Behind this self-conscious stance there lies an awareness of the differences between, in Antonio Gramsci’s terms, the traditional and the organic intellectual. However, the education of the colonial subject both at home and in the metropole—as the case had been with Césaire and many other intellectuals from former and current European colonies—complicates these distinctions. Because colonial education systems privilege imposed hierarchies of metropolitan knowledge and marginalize other ways of knowing, they tend to promote and reward the pursuit of traditional intellectualism. Nevertheless, in his poetry and his politics, Césaire proffers an anticolonial radicalism in spite of his training as a traditional intellectual. For him, the intellectual return to the native land therefore means locating and occupying a stance somewhere between the traditional and the organic intellectual. Césaire’s role model, however, is not the most emulated one for French West Indian intellectuals today. Glissant is critical of a contemporary intellectualism that, in conjunction with an alienated and alienating elite, is responsible for the folklorization or “official” representation of French West Indian culture for tourism (1997, 699) and, hence, for the depoliticization of local culture on the radio and television and at carnival and tourist spectacles (703). Frantz Fanon also critiques these forms of alienation in a chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, entitled “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness.” 6. In a recent article, François Cusset reports that Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokurov have translated “égorgette” as the neologism “snickt,” a combination of “snicked” and “slit” (2000, 41). 7. Chamoiseau and Confiant define oraliture as a number of stories, proverbs, riddles, and songs belonging to a seventeenth-century nascent culture that the conteur through familiar practice turns into oral literature or oraliture (56–57). Because their aim is to trace French West Indian literature from its earliest origins— the study encompasses references from 1635 until 1975—Chamoiseau and Confiant argue that these oral genres constitute a recognizable body of creative work. Hence, the conteur is responsible for producing “littérature audible, une littérature articulée dans l’ethno-texte de la parole” [audible literature, a literature articulated in the ethno-text of speech] (41). When they speak of an oraliture créole, they do so to indicate that this oraliture is the result of negotiated interactions between the dominant colonial culture and the slaves’ countercultural values (57). 8. On the subject of the shift from maroonism to liminality, also consult Richard Price and Sally Price, “Shadowboxing in the Mangrove: The Politics of Identity in Postcolonial Martinique,” in Caribbean Romances: The Politics of Regional Representation, ed. Belinda Edmondson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 123–62. 9. For a description of various kinds of call and response techniques, mostly in music, see Argeliers Léon, “Música popular de origen africano en América Latina,”

162 Notes in Introducción a la cultura africana en América Latina (Paris: UNESCO, 1979). In Yoruba Ritual, Drewal provides diagrammed explanations of play, agency, and improvisation in rituals and spectacles that are also appropriate for understanding the conteur’s oral performances. At the end of Solibo Magnifique, Chamoiseau provides several examples of Solibo’s sayings and the ways in which the latter interspersed calls for his listeners’ attention and response. 10. “Le conte créole est le détour emblématique par quoi, dans l’univers des Plantations, la masse des Martiniquais développait une poétique forcée (que nous appellerons aussi contre-poétique), où se manifestaient en même temps une impuissance à se libérer globalement et un acharnement à tenter de le faire” (1997, 412). Glissant writes that a forced or counterpoetics emerges when there exists a palpable distance between a people’s need and its inability to express something (1997, 402). The inverse is a “natural poetics” in which no such distance and alienation exists. 11. This demand for complete liberation is surprising since Glissant states on another occasion that popular culture is not one of transcendence and development but of survival, one that parallels the economy of survival that began in the plantations (1997, 580). Burton follows suit on these issues in his discussion of opposition, creoleness, and Afro-Creole culture (1997, 8). 12. Dash translates “surdéterminés” as “fixed” and “surdétermination” as “process” (1992, 129). However, I prefer the more literal terms “overdetermined” and “overdetermination” since they capture the psychological nuances in the dynamics of masking and demasking that I have been examining in this study. 13. C’est un des avatars de la pensée occidentale que de prétendre qu’une oeuvre doive toujours se donner sans hiatus, et je connais nombre de contes de nos pays dont la puissance d’impact sur leur auditoire ne tient pas à la clarté de leur sens. Il arrive que l’oeuvre ne soit pas écrite pour quelqu’un, mais pour démonter les mécanismes complexes de la frustration et des variétés infinies de l’oppression. (345) 14. Although he uses it in reference to the English-speaking Caribbean, I believe that Brathwaite’s term “nation-language” (1984, 18) may be used to designate speech in which the African experience in the Caribbean is discernible in creolized dialects across the region. 15. Après l’effondrement du système des plantations (crises sucrières, abolitions de l’esclavage . . . , etc.), après les destructurations, restructurations, conversions et reconversions de toutes sortes qui en ont découlé (assimilation, départementalisation) cette force orale s’est retrouvée tournant à vide, inutile à la promotion sociale, à l’existence citoyenne. Seule la Francité (adoption conjointe de la langue française et de ses valeurs) nommait l’Homme, dans une société en pleine dérive identitaire (1993, 34). This translation, as well as those that follow, come from the Johns Hopkins University Press and Éditions Gallimard bilingual version of the text. 16. Le poète créole d’expression créole, le romancier créole d’expression créole, devra dans le même allant, être le récolteur de la parole ancestrale, le jardinier des vocables nouveaux, le découvreur de la créolité du créole. Il se méfiera de cette langue tout en l’acceptant totalement. Il prendra ses distances par rapport à elle, tout en y plongeant désespérément—et, se méfiant des procédures de la défense-illustration, il éclaboussera cette langue des folies du langage qu’il se sera choisi. (45) 17. Inscribed echoes of the conteur’s art and traditions are also structurally evident in the novel. An omniscient narrator’s call for attention begins each of the

Notes 163 novel’s five sections, Solibo’s sayings are attached in an appendix, and direct quotes by the conteur continuously interrupt the narrative. 18. Burton, in a related field, observes that in Trinidad’s carnival spectatorship has replaced participation as the national festival has been commodified for foreign consumption and locals encounter the festival like tourists in their own land (1997, 208). 19. This apparently naive distinction between the law and upholding the peace not only functions to sharpen the borders between bureaucratic responsibilities both locally and in the metropole but also generates literal readings that local functionaries insist upon when they exercise their power. I want to argue that this kind of demand for the literal informs the authorities’ clamor that a crime had been committed. 20. Tu tu tu ne me connais pas? enrage alors Diab-Anba-Feuilles, si tu ne me connais pas demande qui je suis, Diable, c’est comme ça qu’on m’appelle, et je suis un genre de caca pourri, tu comprends ça? une calamité, et si je commence avec toi c’est jusqu’à la mort, je meurs sur toi. . . . j’ai déjà rempli treize tombes du cimetière Trabaut. (92) 21. From the perspective of the island’s literary currents, it is intriguing that Doudou-Ménar—arguably an allusion to doudouisme or folkloric Creole writing or representation—should be the object of such violent treatment by representatives of official and legal discourse. 22. [L]a vision intérieure est révélatrice, donc révolutionnaire. Réapprendre à visualiser nos profondeurs. Réapprendre à regarder positivement ce qui palpite autour de nous. La vision intérieure défait d’abord la vieille imagerie française qui nous tapisse, et nous restitue à nous-mêmes en une mosaïque renouvelée par l’autonomie de ses éléments, leur imprévisibilité, leurs résonances devenues mystérieuses. (1993, 24).

This page intentionally left blank

Works Cited

Alexander, Jacqui M. 1991. “Redrafting Morality: The Postcolonial State and the Sexual Offences Bill of Trinidad and Tobago.” In Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, 133– 52. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Althusser, Louis. 1994. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation).” In Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Zˇ i zˇek, 100–40. London: Verso. Álvarez-Borland, Isabel. 1987. “Readers, Writers, and Interpreters in Cabrera Infante’s Texts.” World Literature Today 61, no. 4: 553–58. Anthony, Michael. 1989. Parade of the Carnivals of Trinidad, 1839–1989. Port of Spain: Circle Press. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 1992. In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. 1992. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Trans. James Maraniss. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. ———. 1997. “Caribbean Culture: A Carnivalesque Approach.” In A History of Literature in the Caribbean, ed. A. James Arnold, 3: 203–13. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant. 1993. Éloge de la Créolité. In Praise of Creoleness. Bilingual ed. Trans. M. B. Taleb-Khyar. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press and Éditions Gallimard. Bettelheim, Judith. 1994. “Ethnicity, Gender, and Power: Carnaval in Santiago de Cuba.” In Negotiating Performance: Gender, Sexuality, and Theatricality in Latin/o America, ed. Diana Taylor and Juan Villegas, 176–212. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Bettelheim, Judith, John Nunley, and Barbara Bridges. 1988. “Caribbean Festival Arts: An Introduction.” In Caribbean Festival Arts, ed. John W. Nunley and Judith Bettelheim, 31–37. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” In The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. 165

166 Works Cited Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. 1984. History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry. London: New Beacon. Brydon, Diana. 1989. “Trusting the Contradictions: Competing Ideologies in Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance.” English Studies in Canada 15, no. 3: 319–35. Burke, Peter. 1997. “The Translation of Culture: Carnival in Two or Three Worlds.” In Varieties of Cultural History. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Burton, Richard D. E. 1995a. Introduction to French and West Indian: Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana Today, ed. Richard D. E. Burton and Fred Reno, 1–19. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. ———. 1995b. “The Idea of Difference in Contemporary French West Indian Thought: Négritude, Antillanité, Créolité.” In French and West Indian: Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana Today, ed. Richard D. E. Burton and Fred Reno, 137–66. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. ———. 1997. Afro-Creole: Power, Opposition, and Play in the Caribbean. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge. Cabrera Infante, Guillermo. 1994. Tres tristes tigres. Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral. ———. 1996. Ella cantaba boleros. Madrid: Alfaguara. Cairo Resnick, Claudia. 1976. “The Use of Jokes in Cabrera Infante’s Tres tristes tigres.” Latin American Literary Review 4, no. 9: 14–21. Césaire, Aimé. 1983. Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry. Trans. Clayton Eshelman and Annette Smith. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Chamoiseau, Patrick. 1988. Solibo Magnifique. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Chamoiseau, Patrick, and Raphaël Confiant. 1991. Lettres Créoles: Tracées Antillaises et continentales de la littérature 1635–1975. Paris: Hatier. Clark, Vévé. 1994. “Performing the Memory of Difference in Afro-Caribbean Dance: Katherine Dunham’s Choreography, 1938–87.” In History and Memory in AfricanAmerican Culture, ed. Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Meally, 188–204. Oxford University Press. Cohen, Abner. 1993. Masquerade Politics: Explorations in the Structure of Urban Cultural Movements. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Cooper, Carolyn. 1995. Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Crowley, Daniel J. 1988a. “Midnight Robbers.” In Trinidad Carnival. A republication of the Caribbean Quarterly Trinidad Carnival issue 4, no. 3/4 (1956): 164–85. Port of Spain: Paria. ———. 1988b. “The Traditional Masques of Carnival.” In Trinidad Carnival. A republication of the Caribbean Quarterly Trinidad Carnival issue 4, no. 3/4 (1956): 42–90. Port of Spain: Paria. Cusset, François. 2000. “Écritures métissées.” Magazine Littéraire 392: 40–42. Dash, J. Michael. 1998. The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Dayan, Joan. 1995. Haiti, History, and the Gods. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Den Tandt, Catherine. 1999. “All That Is Black Melts into Air: Negritud and Nation in Puerto Rico.” In Caribbean Romances: The Politics of Regional Representation, ed. Belinda Edmondson, 76–91. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

Works Cited 167 Drewal, Margaret Thompson. 1992. Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Du Bois, W. E. B. 1990. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Vintage. Edmondson, Belinda. 1999. “Trinidad Romance: The Invention of Jamaica Carnival.” In Caribbean Romances: The Politics of Regional Representation, ed. Belinda Edmondson, 56–75. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Weidenfeld. ———. 1968. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove. Foucault, Michel. 1971. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon. Freud, Sigmund. 1963. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton. Gallagher, David P. 1974. “Guillermo Cabrera Infante.” In Guillermo Cabrera Infante, ed. Julio Ortega, Julio Matas, Luis Gregorich, Emir Rodríguez Monegal, and David Gallagher, 47–79. Madrid: Editorial Fundamentos. García Canclini, Néstor. 1995. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. López. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gardiner, Michael. 1999. “Bakhtin and the Metaphorics of Perception.” In Interpreting Visual Culture: Explorations in the Hermeneutics of the Visual, ed. Ian Heywood and Barry Sandywell, 57–73. London: Routledge. Geertz, Clifford. 1983. “From the Native’s Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding.” In Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Glissant, Édouard. 1992. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. ———. 1997. Le discours antillais. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Goldberg, David Theo. 1996. “In/Visibility and Super/Vision: Fanon on Race, Veils, and Discourses of Resistance.” In Fanon: A Critical Reader, ed. Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Renée T. White, 179–200. Oxford: Blackwell. González, José Luis. 1989. El país de cuatro pisos. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Huracán. González Echevarría, Roberto. 1985. The Voice of the Masters: Writing and Authority in Modern Latin American Literature. Austin: University of Texas Press. Goodman, Walter. 1988. “Crónicas de un viajero. Máscaras en Santiago de Cuba.” In El carnaval santiaguero, ed. Nancy Pérez Rodríguez, 1: 97–106. Santiago de Cuba: Editorial Oriente. Guibert, Rita. 1974. “Guillermo Cabrera Infante: Conversación sobre Tres tristes tigres.” In Guillermo Cabrera Infante, ed. Julio Ortega, Julio Matas, Luis Gregorich, Emir Rodríguez Monegal, and David Gallagher, 19–46. Madrid: Editorial Fundamentos. Guillén, Nicolás. 1975. “Rosendo Ruiz.” In Prosa de prisa, 1929–1972. Vol. 1. Havana: Editorial Arte y Literatura. Hall, Stuart. 1989. “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation.” Framework 36: 68–81.

168 Works Cited Harney, Stefano. 1996. Nationalism and Identity: Culture and the Imagination in a Caribbean Diaspora. London: Zed Books. Harrison, Daphne Duval. 1990. Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Henry, Paget. 2000. Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy. New York: Routledge. Hill, Errol. 1972. The Trinidad Carnival: Mandate for a National Theatre. Austin: University of Texas Press. Hintjens, Helen. 1995. “Constitutional and Political Change in the French Caribbean.” French and West Indian: Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana Today, ed. Richard D. E. Burton and Fred Reno, 20–33. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Holquist, Michael. 1984. Prologue to Rabelais and His World, by Mikhail Bakhtin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jack, Belinda. 1996. Francophone Literatures: An Introductory Survey. Oxford: Oxford University Press. James, C. L. R. 1992. “Lincoln, Carnival, George Padmore: Writings from The Nation.” In The C. L. R. James Reader, ed. Anna Grimshaw, 281–95. London: Blackwell. Jameson, Fredric. 1998. “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue.” In The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, 54–77. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Judy, Ronald A. T. 1996. “Fanon’s Body of Black Experience.” In Fanon: A Critical Reader, ed. Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Renée T. White, 53–73. Oxford: Blackwell. Koningsbruggen, Peter van. 1997. Trinidad Carnival: A Quest for National Identity. London: Macmillan Education Ltd. Lacan, Jacques. 1981. “Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a.” In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton. ———. 1994. “The Mirror-Phase as Formative of the Function of the I.” In Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Zˇ i zˇek, 93–99. London: Verso. LaCapra, Dominick. 1983. “Bakhtin, Marxism, and the Carnivalesque.” In Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Lovelace, Earl. 1979. The Dragon Can’t Dance. Burnt Mill, U.K.: Longman. Mañach, Jorge. 1969. Indagación del choteo. Miami: Mnemosyne. Marx, Karl. 1978. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” In The MarxEngels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 594–617. 2d ed. New York: W. W. Norton. Miller, Daniel. 1997. Modernity: An Ethnographic Approach: Dualism and Mass Consumption in Trinidad. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Minshall, Peter. 1985. “The Use of Traditional Figures in Carnival Art.” Speech read at the First National Conference on the Performing Arts, Trinidad and Tobago, June 25. ———. 1989. “Where Do We Go from Here?” Speech read at Citizen’s Forum, Queen’s Royal College Old Boys’ Association, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, March 8. ———. 1991. “Address.” Speech read at ceremony to confer the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, November 2.

Works Cited 169 National Carnival Commission of Trinidad and Tobago Act. Act No. 9 of 1991. 3rd Parliament, 5th sess., August 8, 1991. Nettleford, Rex. 1988. “Implications for Caribbean Development.” In Caribbean Festival Arts, ed. John W. Nunley and Judith Bettelheim, 183–97. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Nunley, John. 1988. “Masquerade Mix-up in Trinidad Carnival: Live Once, Die Forever.” In Caribbean Festival Arts: Each and Every Bit of Difference, ed. John W. Nunley and Judith Bettelheim, 85–118. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Olaniyan, Tejumola. 1999. “Derek Walcott: Liminal Spaces/Substantive Histories.” In Caribbean Romances: The Politics of Regional Representation, ed. Belinda Edmondson, 199–214. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Padilla, Heberto. 1990. Self-Portrait of the Other. Trans. Alexander Coleman. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Pantin, Raoul. 1990. Black Power Day: The 1970 February Revolution: A Reporter’s Story. Santa Cruz, Trinidad and Tobago: Hatuey Productions. Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. 1997. “Writers Playin’ Mas’: Carnival and the Grotesque in the Contemporary Caribbean Novel.” In A History of Literature in the Caribbean, ed. A. James Arnold, 3: 215–36. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pêcheux, Michel. 1994. “The Mechanism of Ideological (Mis)Recognition.” In Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Zˇ i zˇek, 141–51. London: Verso. Pereda, Rosa María. 1979. Cabrera Infante. Madrid: EDAF. Pérez Firmat, Gustavo. 1984. “Riddles of the Sphincter: Another Look at the Cuban Choteo.” Diacritics 14, no. 4: 67–77. Pérez Rodríguez, Nancy. 1988. El carnaval santiaguero. Vol 1. Santiago de Cuba: Editorial Oriente. Pérez Sarduy, Pedro, and Jean Stubbs. 1993. “Introduction: The Rite of Social Communion.” In Afrocuba: An Anthology of Cuban Writing on Race, Politics, and Culture. Melbourne, Australia: Ocean Press. Powrie, Barbara E. 1988. “The Changing Attitude of the Coloured Middle Class Towards Carnival.” In Trinidad Carnival. A republication of the Caribbean Quarterly Trinidad Carnival issue 4, no. 3/4 (1956): 91–107. Port of Spain: Paria. Procope, Bruce. 1988. “The Dragon Band or Devil Band.” In Trinidad Carnival. A republication of the Caribbean Quarterly Trinidad Carnival issue 4, no. 3/4 (1956): 186–96. Port of Spain: Paria. Puri, Shalini. 1999. “Canonized Hybridities, Resistant Hybridities: Chutney Soca, Carnival, and the Politics of Nationalism.” In Caribbean Romances: The Politics of Regional Representation, ed. Belinda Edmondson, 12–38. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Ramchand, Kenneth. 1988. “Why the Dragon Can’t Dance: An Examination of Indian-African Relations in Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance.” Journal of West Indian Literature 2, no. 2: 1–14. Reno, Fred. 1995. “Politics and Society in Martinique.” In French and West Indian: Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana Today, ed. Richard D. E. Burton and Fred Reno, 34–47. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Reyes, Angelita. 1986. “‘All o’ We Is One’ or Carnival as a Ritual of Resistance: The Dragon Can’t Dance.” In African Literature in Its Social and Political Dimensions,

170 Works Cited ed. Eileen Julien, Mildred Mortimer, and Curtis Schade, 59–68. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press. Rivero, Eliana. 1982. “Hacia un análisis feminista de Tres tristes tigres.” In Theory and Practice of Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. Gabriela Mora and Karen S. van Hooft, 279–91. Ypsilanti, Mich.: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe. Robbins, Bruce. 1998. “Introduction Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism.” In Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, 1–19. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rowe, William, and Vivian Schelling. 1991. Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America. London: Verso. Sampath, Niels. 1997. “Mas’ Identity: Tourism and Global and Local Aspects of Trinidad Carnival.” In Tourists and Tourism: Identifying with People and Places, ed. Simone Abram, Jacqueline Waldren, and Donald V. L. Macleod, 149–71. Oxford: Berg. Sartre, Jean-Paul. n.d. Black Orpheus. Trans. S. W. Allen. Paris: Présence Africaine. Schmitt, Richard. 1996. “Racism and Objectification: Reflections on Themes from Fanon.” In Fanon: A Critical Reader, ed. Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean SharpleyWhiting, and Renée T. White, 35–50. Oxford: Blackwell. Silverman, Kaja. 1996. The Treshold of the Visible World. New York: Routledge. Souza, Raymond D. 1996. Guillermo Cabrera Infante: Two Islands, Many Worlds. Austin: University of Texas Press. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. 1986. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Thomas, H. Nigel. 1991. “From ‘Freedom’ to ‘Liberation’: An Interview with Earl Lovelace.” World Literature Written in English 31, no. 1: 8–20. Thompson, Robert Farris. 1984. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. New York: Vintage. ———. 1988. “Recapturing Heaven’s Glamour: Afro-Caribbean Festivalizing Arts.” In Caribbean Festival Arts: Each and Every Bit of Difference, ed. John W. Nunley and Judith Bettelheim, 16–29. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Torres-Saillant, Silvio. 1997. “The Cross-Cultural Unity of Caribbean Literature: Toward a Centripetal Vision.” In A History of Literature in the Caribbean, ed. A. James Arnold, 3: 57–76. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Walcott, Derek. 1993. “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry.” In Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott, ed. Robert D. Hamner, 51–57. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press. Wilson, Peter J. 1973. Crab Antics: The Social Anthropology of English-Speaking Negro Societies of the Caribbean. New Haven: Yale University Press. Zavala, Iris M. 1997. “When the Popular Sings the Self: Heterology, Popular Songs, and Caribbean Writing.” In A History of Literature in the Caribbean, ed. A. James Arnold, 3: 187–99. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Zˇ i zˇek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso. ———. 1994. “Introduction: The Spectre of Ideology.” In Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Zˇ i zˇek, 1–33. London: Verso.

Index

Afro-Caribbean cultures, 103 Afro-Creole (Burton), 41 Afro-Creole culture, 41–42 Afro-Cubans, 103, 104 Aldrick, 1, 53, 54, 58, 67, 68, 69, 79, 151; Basil and, 59; community of, 52; dragon mask and, 2, 62, 64, 72, 78, 80, 87, 93, 136; enigmatic response of, 51– 52; Fisheye and, 65–66; on identity, 59–60; mas’ of, 71; performance of, 61; revolt of, 71, 155n5; self-possession and, 71–72; social status and, 63 Alexander, Jacqui M., 89, 157n13 Alienation, 46, 134; collective, 72, 126; cultural, 127, 130, 137, 141, 150; political, 127, 137 Althusser, Louis, 27, 28, 34 Alvarez-Borland, Isabel: on Cabrera Infante, 111 Anderson, Benedict, 61 Anthony, Michael, 10, 44, 74, 155n6 Antimaterialism, 53 Appiah, Kwame Anthony: cognitive incapacity and, 7, 8, 27 Arenas, Reinaldo, 44 Ariel (Rodó), 102, 118 Autonomy, 45, 69 Autosexuality, 92, 93 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 11, 44, 141; carnival and, 6, 14; criticism of, 12; on masks/

enlightenment intellectuals, 13; optimistic populism and, 12, 13; on Rabelais, 13, 15 Ballet of crossing the water, 56 Benítez-Rojo, Antonio, 45, 63; masking/ demasking and, 46; metaarchipelago and, 21; travestying mirror and, 28 Bernabé, Jean, 123, 137, 139, 148 Bettelheim, Judith, 54, 94 Bhabha, Homi K.: colonial discourse and, 37, 42; Lacan and, 37–38, 38–39; on mimicry, 33–34, 37, 38 Black: classifying, 25; in-itself/for-itself, 29; (in)visibility, 124 Black Atlantic, The (Gilroy), 20, 26, 27 Black Jacobins, The (James), 26 Blackness, 17, 24, 55, 103; blackened, 30 Black Orpheus (Sartre), 154n7 Black peril, 104, 158–59n6 Black Power movement, 43, 71 Blacks, 32; Cuban nationhood and, 104 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon), 24, 28, 29 Body: hyperbolic approaches to, 118 Bolero singers, 44, 104, 105, 106, 113, 114, 115, 121, 123–24; capturing, 110; emergence of, 120; gender and, 159n12 Botero, Fernando, 113 171

172 Index Bouaffesse, Philémon, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 151 Bourgeois ideology, 15, 73 Brathwaite, Kemau, 19, 20, 162n14 Brydon, Diana, 52, 53, 71 Burke, Peter, 10, 15 Burton, Richard D. E., 79, 90, 163n18; on Afro-Creole culture, 41–42; empty ethos and, 72; on marginality, 91; on national festival, 96; on public space, 96 Butler, Judith: on social life, 31, 122 Cabildos, 56 Cabrera, Lydia, 86, 103 Cabrera, Saba: PM and, 106 Cabrera Infante, Guillermo, 44, 104, 105, 109, 110, 124, 139, 150; popular culture and, 106–7 Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Césaire), 7, 87, 104, 126, 138 Callois, Roger: on mimicry, 33 Calvary Hill, 52, 53–54, 66, 73, 155n2; African diaspora and, 62; dilemma for, 69; dragon of, 64; fragmentation of, 63; nonpossession of, 54, 59, 60, 61, 64 Calypso, 97, 158n14 Camouflage, 33, 37, 41 Canboulay Riots (1880s), 11, 153n3 Capitalism and Slavery (Williams), 26 Caribbean/American peoples, 36 “Caribbean: Culture of Mimicry, The” (Walcott), 31 Caribbean Discourse (Glissant), 1, 39 Caribbean Quarterly: Trinidad Carnival issue of, 55 Carnival, 39, 57; business of, 77, 79–80, 96–97; celebrating, 3, 52, 153n3; contemporary, 76; early history of, 4, 11; legislative notions of, 75; for local/ foreign consumption, 43, 77; masking practices and, 44; middleclassization of, 44; popular culture and, 12, 15, 42, 43–44; prohibition of, 11; promoting, 3–4; social relations and, 2; transformation in, 1 Carnival bands, 81, 98

Carnival Development Committee (CDC), 74 Carnivalesque, 11, 107 Carnival Improvement Committee, 73– 74, 155n6 Carnival Trilogy, The (Harris), 44 Carpentier, Alejo, 86, 103 Castro, Fidel, 124–25 Césaire, Aimé, 7, 21–22, 29, 30, 45, 86, 87, 109, 123, 125, 135; on anticolonial radicalism, 161n5; depiction by, 105; imperialism and, 127; negritude and, 25; on objecthood, 24; poem by, 126, 129, 134, 137, 150; poetic voice and, 128 Chamoiseau, Patrick, 123, 128–31, 135, 137, 138, 139, 148, 149, 150, 162n9; on conteur, 45, 132, 133; on oraliture, 161n7 “Chantwell,” 57 Choteador, 110, 117, 119, 122, 123–24, 150; Estrella and, 124; language of, 118; repertoire of, 160n15 Choteo, 45, 46, 105–6, 113, 115, 117, 118, 122, 123, 125 Chowcito, 107, 108, 120 Civil rights, 12, 24 Clark, Vévé, 54, 62 Class struggle, 121 Códac, 44, 104, 105, 106, 118, 150; African presence and, 120; behavior of, 121; choteo and, 114, 119, 122; cultural identity and, 123; cultural insideness of, 125; description by, 109–10; Estrella and, 108, 110, 111, 115, 116, 120, 122; fantasies of, 123; focus of, 110–13, 119, 122; nocturnal world of, 107–8; protagonism of, 110, 111 Codes of conduct, 2, 115 Colonial culture: demasking, 31 Colonial discourse: ambivalence of, 38, 42 Colonialism, 19, 22, 29, 150; resistance to, 42, 146 Colonial subjects, 38, 86 Coming out: described, 56 Communities: masks and, 67 Competency, 82, 86 Concurrentes, 111

Index 173 Confiant, Raphaël, 123, 131, 135, 137, 138, 139, 148; on conteur, 132, 133; on oraliture, 161n7 Congo, 138, 142, 146 Consciousness: perception and, 27 Conteur, 45, 128–29, 149, 162n17; anticolonial resistance of, 131; art of, 140; authority of, 134; corpse of, 129; Creole folktale and, 131–35; cultural absence of, 142; cultural heritage/ skills of, 129; death of, 129, 130, 133, 135–41; function of, 132, 139, 148; oral tradition of, 142, 144; performance of, 138–39, 142; slavery and, 132–33; subjectivity of, 150 Cooper, Carolyn: on slackness, 94 Cosmopolitanism, 78, 79, 85 Costumes, 43, 74; aesthetics of, 93; cosmopolitan, 79–89; dragon, 62, 93; feminization of, 93; homogenization of, 70; individual/collective, 81; masquerade and, 58 Counterculture, 20, 64, 128, 129 Counterpoetics, 133, 136 Crab Antics (Wilson), 8 Creole, 1, 2, 145, 155n1, 156nn1, 4, 163n21; bourgeoisie, 15; development of, 136; dynamics of, 42; expression, 134, 139; opacity of, 135, 136 Creoleness, 42, 102, 137, 139–40 Criollo, 102, 103, 158n1 Critical traditions, 47 Crowley, Daniel J., 43, 58, 83, 84 Cuban arts and letters: shift in, 103 Cultural hegemony, 81, 102, 130, 149 Cultural homelessness, 76 Cultural homogenization, 102 Cultural identities, 3, 46, 85, 106, 123; national/regional, 101, 102; redefining, 90 Cultural insider-outsider divide, 32 Cultural life: black, 20, 26, 76; historical survival/evolution of, 20; supranational, 5 Cultural values, 11, 75 Culture, 46, 77, 103, 106; high/low, 153n4; local/national, 42; loss of history and, 132; politics and, 32, 59

Cynical reason, 14, 98, 147; masks of, 45, 67, 130, 145, 146, 149, 150 Danse Macabre: Minshall on, 84 Dante, 55 Dash, J. Michael, 45, 46, 68, 131, 162n12 Day, Charles, 16–17, 18, 22, 23 Dayan, Joan, 7, 95, 97, 130 De Certeau, Michel, 42 Decolonization, 127 Dehumanization, 120 Delafosse, Maurice, 102 Del Monte, Domingo, 104 Demasking, 46, 71, 80, 110, 119; forms of, 6, 7; misrecognition and, 10–31; recognition and, 27; self-, 148; social status, 63 Democracy, 21, 79 Den Tandt, Catherine: on negritud /nation, 103 Departmentalization, 3, 127, 144, 149 Devil Mas’, 55, 58 Diab-Anba-Feuilles, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 163n20 Diable-diable, 55 Día de los Reyes, 63 Diario de la Marina, 159n14 Discours antillais (Glissant), 144 Disguises, 18, 30 Dispossession, 52, 53; nonpossession versus, 58–63, 63–68; self-possession and, 63–68, 68–72 “Diversion” (“Le Detour”) (Glissant), 135, 136 Domestic spaces, colonial practice in, 89 Double-consciousness, 24, 29, 38 Double croyance, 127, 135, 145 Doudou-Ménar, 142, 143, 144, 146, 147, 163n21 Dragon bands, 55, 57–58 Dragon Can’t Dance, The (Lovelace), 1, 44, 46, 51, 58, 64, 67, 68, 72, 73, 79, 93, 131 Dragon dance, 54–58, 62, 65, 67, 70 Dragon masks, 1–2, 43, 52, 60, 78, 80, 87, 136; history of, 54–58; mimicry of, 84; using, 1, 56–57

174 Index Dragons, 54, 58, 64; choreography of, 59; liberation/slavery and, 56; menace of, 63 Drewal, Margaret Thompson, 62, 125, 162n9; on repetition, 40, 41, 54; on ritual, 39–40; Yoruba play and, 57 Du Bois, W. E. B., 24, 29, 38 Edmondson, Belinda: on class struggle, 77 Égorgette de la parole, 45, 149 “Eighteenth of Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The” (Marx), 9 “El camino de Harlem” (Guillén), 104 El carnival santiaguero (Pérez Rodríguez), 10 El ingenio (Fraginals), 26 “Ella cantaba boleros” (Cabrera Infante), 104, 105, 107, 108, 111, 123–24 Éloge de la créolité (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant), 137, 139, 148 “El país de cuatro pisos” (González), 39 El peligro negro, 104 Ethnicity, 26, 27, 102 European civilization, 35; deidealizing mirror of, 36 Exaggeration, 30, 41 Exclusion, acts of, 19 “Experience-near” discourse, 154n6 Exploitation, 122–23 Eye, socially productive, 105 Fanon, Frantz, 7, 21, 86, 112, 161n5; on black man, 25; on condition of culture, 137; on decolonialization, 88–89; deidealization and, 87; on interracial relationships, 29; masking/ masking practices and, 4; on middle class, 98; negritude and, 25; on objecthood, 24, 25; Silverman on, 28–29 Fantasia, 123 Festivals, 70, 75, 81, 91, 92, 97; popular, 3–4, 11 First National Conference on the Performing Arts, 83 Fisheye, 64–68, 71 Folklore, 3, 103, 128; conteur and, 131–35

Foucault, Michel, 54 Four Fundamental Concepts of PsychoAnalysis, The (Lacan), 104 Fraginals, Manuel Moreno, 26 French Creole elite, 74, 90, 97, 154n4, 155n1 French language: hegemony of, 137 Frenchness, 149 Freud, Sigmund, 27, 45, 114, 116; on jokes, 115; laughter and, 117 Frobenius, Leo, 102 García Canclini, Néstor, 3, 83 García Márquez, Gabriel, 113 Gardiner, Michael, 141 Gaston-Johnston, Edgar, 74 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 40 Gaze, 95, 113, 114, 116, 122; collective, 24, 111–12, 115; reflections on, 111–12 Geertz, Clifford, 40, 154n6 Gilroy, Paul, 8, 20, 26–27 Glissant, Édouard, 1, 39, 42, 45, 126, 127, 135, 144, 149; on contemporary intellectualism, 161n5; on counterpoetics, 162n12; on Creole, 2, 20, 134, 136; on departmentalization, 137; lamentation of, 138; on Other’s image, 37; on popular culture, 3 Globalization, 10, 77, 137 Goldberg, Davis Theo: on visibility/ invisibility, 4, 97 González, José Luis: model of, 39 González Echevarría, Roberto, 114 Goodman, Walter, 17, 41, 146; on blackened blackness, 30; on carnival, 18; demasking of, 23–24, 31; visual politics of, 22 Gownsmen, 55 Gramsci, Antonio, 161n5 Grotesque, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 19, 23, 107 Guevara, Che, 103 Guibert, Rita, 107 Guillén, Nicolás, 46, 103, 104, 159n14 Haiti, History, and the Gods (Dayan), 7 Haitian Revolution, 7 Hall, Stuart: on difference/identity, 20 Harney, Stephano, 71–72, 154n10

Index 175 Harris, Wilson, 44 Harrison, Daphne Duval: on blues singers, 160n17 Hearn, Lafcadio, 17–18, 22, 23 Henry, Paget, 29 Hill, Errol, 16–17, 18 Hintjens, Helen, 160n3 Hispanism, blackness and, 103 History, 16, 70, 132 History of the Voice (Brathwaite), 19 Holquist, Michael, 13 Hughes, Langston, 160n14 Hutcheon, Linda, 40 Hyperbole, 3, 44 Hyperreal strategies, 30, 41 Ideales de la Raza, 159n14 Identities, 31, 59–60, 77; bourgeois, 15; class, 95; concealing/inverting, 18, 20; cultural, 3, 46, 85, 90, 101, 102, 106, 123; foreign, 156n6; formation, 15; group, 11, 72; male, 91; masking and, 29; privacy and, 18; racial, 18; reaffirmation of, 19, 21–22, 41; social, 54; utopian, 15 “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (Althusser), 27 Imagined Communities (Anderson), 61 Imperialism, 3, 5, 127 Improvisation, 41, 155n5 Imps, 55, 56 Indagación del choteo (Mañach), 101, 116, 160n14 Individualism: triumph of, 71–72 Inferno (Dante), 55 Inner revolution, 22, 104 Institución Hispano-Cubana de Cultura, 116 Intellectual rights/properties, 43 Interior infinite, 14 Internal contradictions, 43 Internationalization, 77, 78, 79, 81 Intimidation, 33, 34, 37, 39, 41 Invisibility, 4, 5, 97 Irena (Irenita), 108, 109, 111, 113, 114 Jab-Jab, 55, 56 Jab-molassi, 17

Jambette, 143 James, C. L. R., 26, 73, 80, 88 Jameson, Fredric, 75 Jamet, 79, 90, 94, 95, 156n5 Jiménez Leal, Orlando: PM and, 106 Jokes, 114, 115 Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (Freud), 114 Jones, Patrick, 55 Judy, Ronald A. T.: on Fanon, 28–29 Koningsbruggen, Peter von, 8, 67, 76, 157n11; on costume styles, 93; on jamet, 156n5; on middle-classization, 77, 156n4; Trinidad carnival and, 74–75; on winin’, 94; on women/ carnival, 90 Lacan, Jacques, 33, 45, 119; Bhabha and, 37–38, 38–39; on eye/gaze, 111; field of vision of, 112–13; on Freud, 27; on masks, 113; on mimicry, 37, 154n11; over-valuation and, 34; on places/ agency, 34; Silverman and, 28, 159n13; subjectivities and, 6, 29 LaCapra, Dominick: on grotesque, 12 La Estrella. See Rodríguez, Estrella Lam, Wifredo, 86, 103 Language, 118; French, 137; masking practices and, 44; nation, 20, 162n14 La raza cósmica (Vasconcelos), 102 Las Casas, Father, 120 Le discours antillais (Glissant), 126 Lettres créoles (Chamoiseau and Confiant), 131, 135–36, 138 Lezama Lima, José, 44 Liberation: slavery/dragons and, 56 Lieux de mémoire, 54, 62 “Lincoln, Carnival, George Padmore: Writings from The Nation”: (James), 73 Listeners: conteur and, 139 Literary tradition, 13, 46 “Los funerales de la Mamá Grande” (García Márquez), 113 Lovelace, Earl, 1, 5, 43, 44, 51, 59, 63, 64, 80, 155n2; analysis by, 68; group identity and, 72; perspicacity of, 2

176 Index Lower-frequency politics, 9, 10, 21, 26, 134, 144, 150, 145 Lunes de Revolución (Cabrera Infante), 107 Maitreya (Sarduy), 113 Mama Grande, 113 Mañach, Jorge, 45, 101, 159n14; behavioral idiosyncrasy and, 116; on choteo, 117, 118; cultural habit and, 117; cultural politics and, 119; on hyperbolic approaches, 118; strategic practices and, 125 Marginalization, 87, 91, 130, 142 Maroons, 53, 161n8 Marronage, 134 Marx, Karl, 9–10, 21, 27, 57 Mas’, 58, 59, 67, 71, 83, 86, 88; pretty, 80, 93; traditional, 80 Masked subjects, 16, 78; agreement between, 63; observers and, 2; viewing subjects and, 5 Masking: demasking and, 7; evaluation of, 3; identity formation and, 29; mimicry and, 10; misrecognition and, 10–31; practices, 2–3, 16, 28, 31, 41, 44, 46, 151, 154n5; recognition and, 27; rhetorical, 45 Masks, 14, 55, 58, 69, 151; art as, 131; communities and, 67; contexts/styles of, 16; European assessment of, 14; grotesque, 24; metaphorical/ rhetorical uses of, 3, 28; real/ figurative/rhetorical, 5; unruly behavior and, 11; veils and, 18–19 Mas’ men, 79–82, 86, 89, 93 Masqued, 75, 155n1 Masquerades, 23, 30, 58, 95, 98 Mass media, 91, 137 McWilliams, Irwin, 90 Méconnaissance, 27 Memory, 135, 162 Meta-archipelago, 21 Middle class, 74, 78, 79, 87, 96; alliance with, 81–82; aspirations of, 8; carnival and, 76, 81; encroachment of, 73; formation of, 16; hypocrisy of, 83; reputation and, 90; respectabil-

ity and, 90; self-contempt of, 98 Middle-classization, 44, 77, 89, 95, 156n4 Middle Passage, The (Naipaul), 31, 56 Milieux de mémoire, 54 Miller, Daniel, 81, 155n7, 157n10; autosexuality and, 93; on calypsos, 97; essentialism and, 93; reasoning and, 92; on winin’, 91, 92 Mimic Men, The (Naipaul), 31 Mimicry, 31–47, 68, 69, 70, 132, 139, 154n11; as active engagement, 33–34; camouflage and, 37; carnival and, 83; colonial power and, 37; combatants and, 57; conceptualization of, 32; criticism of, 39–40; forms of, 31, 32; intimidation and, 39; Lacanian, 95; masking and, 10; middle class and, 44; politically transcendent, 33; tactical mimicry of, 17 Minshall, Peter, 80, 89; on carnival art, 83; cultural uniqueness and, 157n7; on European avant-garde, 156n6; on mas’, 82, 84, 85, 87; rhetorical assimilation of, 85; self-contempt and, 86–87, 98; transcendence and, 88 “Mirror-Phase as Formative of the Function of the I, The” (Lacan), 33 Misrecognition, 6; (de)masking and, 10–31 Modernity, 81, 85, 155n3, 156n3 Molasses devil, 17 Moore, Robin, 160n14 Morality, 7, 89, 157n13 Morrison, Toni, 24 Motivos de son (Guillén), 104 Naipaul, V. S., 154n10; on mimicry, 31, 35, 36, 39–40 Nation: legislative notions of, 75 National Carnival Commission (NCC), 74, 98, 157n7, 158n14; cultural politics of, 95–96; legislation for, 78; mandate of, 43, 75, 77 National Carnival Commission of Trinidad and Tobago Act (Act No. 9) (1991), 43, 74, 76, 77, 84

Index 177 National community: masks and, 55 National consciousness, 89, 98 National culture, 42, 74, 75, 76, 79; appropriate image of, 78; foreign consumption of, 4 Nationalism, 26, 79, 85, 88, 129; Creole middle-class, 82, 84 Nationalizing Blackness (Moore), 160n14 Nationhood, 103 Neg jade, 95 Nègre marron, 131 Negrismo, 103 Negritud, 24, 25, 103, 154n7 Neocolonialism, 78, 98, 129, 149 Nettleford, Rex, 59 Nonpossession, 52, 53; dispossession versus, 58–63, 63–68; philosophy of, 59, 60, 61, 69; self-possession versus, 63–68 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Césaire), 21 Nunley, 54, 80 Objectification, 17, 25, 120 Observers: masked subjects and, 2 Obsolescence: valorization of, 55 Occidental modernity: Black Atlantic and, 26 “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” (Bhabha), 37 “Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a ” (Lacan), 33 Olaniyan, Tejumola, 31, 35 Optimistic populism, 12, 13 Oraliture créole, 131, 137, 141, 149, 161n7 Ortiz, Fernando, 103, 160n14 Other America, The (Dash), 45 Overdetermination, 13, 26, 30, 41, 162n12 Over-valuation, 34, 37, 41 Palés Matos, Luis, 103 Pan-Caribbeanism, 46 Pan-Hispanism, 103 Pantin, Raoul, 43, 71 Parade of Carnivals in Trinidad, 1839– 1989 (Anthony), 10

Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth, 11, 12, 155n5 Partial presence, 38, 40 Paul, Felix, 157n7 Paul, Figaro, 143, 145 Peau noire, masques blancs (Fanon), 7 Pêcheux, Michel: on reproduction/ transformation, 41 People’s Liberation Army, 66, 70 People’s National Movement (PNM), 74 Perception: consciousness and, 27 Pereda, Rosa María, 109 Pérez Firmat, Gustavo, 117 Pérez Rodríguez, Nancy, 10, 17, 44 Performance, 87, 88, 92; culture of, 90; middle class and, 44; privatization of, 78, 95; ritual, 40; sexuality in, 94– 95 Perla, Vítor, 108, 109, 111, 113, 114, 120 Personhood, 59–60 Phallocentrism, 94 Philibon, Justin, 142, 144 Philips, Skeedo, 55 Philo, 65, 69, 73 Picong, 46 Pilon, Évariste, 139, 148, 149, 151 Pires, B. C., 94 Plantations, 3; failure of, 137; subjectivities/cultural life in, 20–21 PM (documentary), 106, 159n9 Poetics, forced, 133, 134 Poetic voice, 23, 24, 127, 128 Poetry, Creole, 139 Political autonomy, 4, 70, 98 Political voice, 46 Politics: carnival and, 95; culture and, 32; discourse and, 153n1; mimicry and, 32; of transfiguration, 20 Politics and Poetics of Transgression, The (Stallybrass and White), 14 “Politics and Society in Martinique” (Reno), 130 Popular culture, 3, 39, 46, 79, 106, 124, 129, 130, 149; carnival and, 6, 7, 12, 15, 42, 43–44; oral, 10; privatization of, 3; urban, 103 Port of Spain, 52, 59, 66, 69, 74, 156n2; Aldrick and, 60, 62; carnival practices in, 73

178 Index Poverty, 22, 23, 53 Power structures, 41, 130 Powrie, Barbara, 96 Pretty mas’, 80, 93 Procope, Bruce, 43, 56, 57–58 Psychosocial decolonialization, 22 Public space, 9, 19, 89, 90; claiming, 25– 26; colonial, 30; hidden, 21, 32; ideology/politics of, 96 Puri, Shalini, 85 Queen’s Park Savannah, 74, 87, 156n2 Quimboiseur, 133 Rabelais and His World (Bakhtin), 6, 11, 13–14, 44, 107 Ramchand, Kenneth, 53, 72; on veils/ masks, 18–19, 154n5 Raza, 102, 103 Reaffirmation, counteroffensive for, 26 Recognition, (de)masking and, 27, 29 “Red Dragon Band,” 55 Réflexe colonialiste, 130 Réjouis, Rose-Myriam: on égorgette/ snickt, 161n6 Reno, Fred, 130, 160–61n3 Repeating Island, The (Benítez-Rojo), 45, 46 Repetition, 39–40, 41 Reputation, 8, 65, 79, 90 Resistance, 133, 134, 146; countercultural, 129; internal forces of, 41 Resnick, Claudia Cairo, 121 Respectability, 89, 90, 93; reputation and, 8, 65, 79 “Reversion” (“Le Retour”) (Glissant), 135, 136 Revolution, 53, 67, 69; character of, 9– 10; occidental narratives of, 9 Rivero, Eliana, 106 Robbins, Bruce: on nationalism/ cosmopolitanism, 79 Rodó, José Enrique, 102, 118 Rodríguez, Estrella, 44, 104, 106, 111–14, 146, 150–51; choteador and, 124; Códac and, 108, 110, 111, 115, 116, 120, 122; collective gaze and, 115; corpulence of, 105, 108, 113, 115, 119,

120, 121, 124, 125; death/burial of, 107, 123–24, 125, 139; eroticization of, 109– 10; nudity of, 115; self-assertion of, 105; self-naming and, 120; subjectivity of, 112 Rowe, William, 15–16, 155n3, 156n2 Ruiz, Rosendo: son musical tradition and, 104 Ryan, Judilyn, 24 Saldenah, Harold, 90 Samba, 56, 156n5 Sampath, Neils, 75, 77, 96, 157n11; on carnival, 79, 81 Sánchez, Luis Rafael, 44 Santiago de Cuba: carnival at, 10, 17, 30, 146 Sarduy, Severo, 44, 113 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 29, 154n7 Saussure, 110 Scamaroni, Gilbert, 55 Schelling, Vivian, 15–16, 155n3, 156n5 Schmitt, Richard, 17, 125 Schnabel, Julien, 159n9 Screen, 111, 119–23 Seeing: masking and, 5 Self-assertion, 19, 105 Self-consciousness, 61, 72, 84, 89, 150 Self-contempt: Creole middle-class, 98; eliminating, 86–87; personal/ collective, 88 Self-demasking, 148 Self-effacement, 133, 140, 150 Self-government, 5, 151 Self-knowledge: masks and, 5 Self-possession, 52; dispossession versus, 63–68, 68–72; nonpossession versus, 63–68 Self-recognition, 6, 22, 24, 30 Self-rule, 33, 42 Sex ratio: reversal of, 93, 94 Sexual Offences Bill (1986), 157n12 Silverman, Kaja, 45, 101, 106, 112, 119, 154n9; deidealizing and, 29; on Fanon, 28; on female subject/ spectacle, 114; Lacan and, 28, 159n13; on places/agency, 34; on socially productive eye, 105

Index 179 Slavery, 59, 67, 134; abolition of, 104, 120, 137; conteur and, 132–33; liberation/dragons and, 56; miseries of, 132; objectification/classification/ concealment of, 25 Snake-killing dances, 63 Soca songwriters/performers, 97, 158n14 Social agencies, 11, 32 Social functions: carnival and, 63 Socialist realism, 13, 107 Social justice, 51, 126 Social life, 11, 31, 122 Social order, 21, 36 Social protest: carnival and, 52 Social status, 18, 63, 151 Socioeconomic concerns, 5, 78 Solibo, 129, 146, 148, 162n9, 163n17; death of, 45, 138–43, 145, 147, 149, 150; last performance of, 141–42; police investigation of, 130; Ti-Cham and, 140 Solibo Magnifique (Chamoiseau), 45, 128–29, 130, 138, 139, 141, 150 Son musical tradition, 104, 160n14 Spanish-American War (1898), 102 Spectacle: female subject and, 114 Stalin, Joseph: socialist realism under, 107 Stallybrass, Peter, 14, 156n3; on grotesque, 19, 30; on identity formation, 15; masking strategies and, 16; on optimistic populism, 12; on sublimation, 88 Subjectivities, 31; black, 20, 29; masked, 16, 21; reaffirmation of, 20 Surdétermination/surdéterminés, 162n12 Sylvia, 58, 72 Symbolic meanings, 14, 43 Systematic blindness, 130, 131 Tar Baby (Morrison), 24 Thiong’o, Ngugi wa: decolonization and, 127 Thomas, H. Nigel, 67 Thompson, Robert Farris: on Yoruba masking, 6

Threshold of the Visible World, The (Silverman), 28, 101 Ti-Cham, 140, 141, 142 Torres-Saillant, Silvio, 46 Tourism, 81, 122–23, 156n6 Tradition: romantic theory of, 31 Travesty, 28, 33, 41 Tres tristes tigres (Cabrera Infante), 44, 104, 106–7, 111, 139, 146, 150 Trinidad Carnival, The (Hill), 16, 84 Tuntún y pasa de grifería (Pales Matos), 103 Underdevelopment, mocking/ disguising, 52 “Use of Traditional Figures in Carnival Art, The” (Minshall), 83, 85 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 107 Vasconcelos, José, 102 Veiling, 65, 154n5 Veils, 28, 154n5; masks and, 18–19 Viewing subjects: masked subjects and, 5 Violence, 45, 71 Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, 46 Visibility, 4, 157n12; social, 13, 18, 81 Visual politics, 8, 22 Visual tropes, 81 Walcott, Derek, 31, 40, 55; on Caribbean history, 32; on centrality of blacks, 32; cultural subjectivities and, 36; on European civilization, 35–36; on mimicry, 32, 33, 35, 36, 132; on pantomime, 35 Warriorhood, 57, 65, 66, 131 Water, John, 113 “Where Do We Go from Here?” (Minshall), 82, 84, 88 White, Allon, 14, 156n3; on grotesque, 19, 30; on identity formation, 15; masking strategies and, 16; on optimistic populism, 12; on sublimation, 88 Williams, Eric, 26, 74 Wilson, Peter J., 90; on negotiated relationships, 8; sharing values and, 89; on utopianism, 91

180 Index Winers, 91, 95 Winin’, 79, 89–90, 95, 96, 98, 157n12; carnival and, 91, 92; phallocentrism and, 94; women and, 92, 93, 97 Women: carnival and, 90, 92–93, 157n12; marginality of, 91; middle-class, 90; respectability and, 93; as winers, 95; winin’ and, 92, 93 Woodford Square, 66, 70

Wretched of the Earth, The (Fanon), 88, 137 Yoruba, 6, 39, 40 Zammees, 91, 157n11 Zavala, Iris M., 120, 121, 159n12 Zˇ i zˇek, Slavoj, 4, 6, 7, 54, 71; on cynical reason, 98; on irony/sarcasm, 130; on revolutionary process, 10

Gerard Aching teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. He is author of The Politics of Spanish American Modernismo, a study of late nineteenth-century Spanish-American aesthetics and cultural politics.