Slavery and the Culture of Taste

by Gikandi, Simon;

  4

  One can see why forms of ritual such as Obeah and Myal (and Vodun in Haiti and Santeria in Cuba), which seemed excessive in the eyes of typical eighteenth-century Europeans, products of the culture of taste that opened this book, would become the centerpiece of the slaves' alternative aesthetic.96 On encountering the world of the slave, the men of taste found cultural practices that were at odds with the integers of civilized society. A good part of this oddity was the invisibility and inscrutability of ritual. Finding themselves in the midst of slave cultures and eager to produce a discourse that would explain the new-world African, gentlemen of taste such as Bryan Edwards were constantly exasperated by the genesis of secrecy that surrounded the governing codes of the enslaved: “A veil of mystery is studiously thrown over their incantations, to which the midnight hours are allotted, and every precaution is taken to conceal them from the knowledge and discovery of the White people.”97 Edwards then went on to underscore how the fetishes that had been used to demonize the Africans in West Africa had now become a source of their power in the Americas: “The deluded Negroes, who thoroughly believe in their supernatural power, become the willing accomplices in this concealment, and the stoutest among them tremble at the very sight of the ragged bundle, the bottle or the egg-shells, which are stuck in the thatch or hung over the door of a hut, or upon the branch of a plantain tree, to deter marauders.”98

  Edward's complaint that slaves in Jamaica were involved in deluded practices that were, nonetheless, outside the realm of white knowledge is central to the argument I have been developing so far regarding the emergence of a space of cultural expression outside the hermeneutics of modernity. For what seemed to frustrate Edwards was not simply African delusions among the enslaved, but the inability of white proprietors to penetrate the ritual codes of slaves and bring them under the regimen of modern knowledge. Edwards was particularly irked by the inability of the governing class to isolate Obeah men and women from “any other Negro”; he was equally exasperated by the power Obeah people had over both “ignorant” and “wiser” Negroes.

  What Edwards did not countenance is the possibility that part of the power of Obeah and other forms of magic among the enslaved was derived not from ignorance or fear of vengeance, but from the slaves' investment in these practices as part of a larger cognitive apparatus in the project of self-making and community building. This explains his infatuation with what, for the modern mind, appeared injurious and irrational, the opposite of the rationality and order of modern civility and the culture of sensibility. Furthermore, Edwards failed to recognize the power of the spectacle itself and indeed the compulsion of what seemed to exist outside the order of rationality. For it is quite apparent that slave performances were spectacles that eluded the power of vision or, as Foucault would put it, the power of surveillance.

  In Discipline and Punish, Foucault makes a crucial distinction between spectacle and surveillance. Modern society, he argues, uses surveillance as a technology of forces and bodies whose goal is to conscript individuals into the service of the institutions of power. In the field of power and its systems of representation, argues Foucault, subjects are not simply amputated, repressed, and altered by the social order; rather, the individual is “fabricated” according to “a whole technique of forces and bodies.”99 In the regime of surveillance, subjects are on display to be observed, but observation is also a form of control. In the world of spectacle, on the other hand, the subject is no longer observable since, as Guy Debord puts it, “the spectacle's job is to cause a world that is no longer directly perceptible to be seen via different specialized mediations.”100

  What I am arguing is that those forms of play that frightened white planters because they took place in a dark, secretive world—one that was imperceptible to their eyes and seemed outside the realm of European reason—were the essence of the slaves' revolt against the political and cultural order that rationalized bondage. Furthermore, forms of cultural expression that were the most likely to be dismissed as meaningless spectacle were also those that were valued by slaves themselves as they sought to produce a counterculture, including one that went against the grain of sense and sensibility. What is at issue here, then, is the slaves' performance as an assemblage of values that were inaccessible to their masters and dissociated from the accepted social order, the realm of surveillance. Dance, song, and sound represented what had clarity for the slaves but was inaudible to the masters. Herein lies the significance of those accounts coming from the archive of slavery where witnesses, confronted by black sound, song, or dance, could discern the significance of what they saw but were not sure what it meant and were then left pondering the meaning of a spectacle that was disharmonious and at odds with European aesthetic practices.

  Let us look at some examples: On February 21, 1819, Benjamin Latrobe, the distinguished architect and engineer, “accidentally stumbled upon” a group of blacks playing a jumble of instruments that “made an incredible noise.”101 The most curious contraption, noted Latrobe, “was a string instrument which no doubt was imported from Africa”; on the top of the finger board “was the rude figure of a Man in a sitting position, and two pegs behind him to which the strings were fastened.”102 The Africans beat these instruments to a song that only seemed to add to the cacophony: “A Man sung an uncouth song to the dancing which I supposed was in some African language, for it was not French, and the Women screamed a detestable burthen on one single note.”103 What Latrobe didn't recognize was that behind the dissociation of notes, and beneath the noise that caught the observer's attention, slaves had found ways of perpetuating an African idiom where it was not supposed to exist, that the jumbled instruments and notes that annoyed him, and the scene of performance or dance that irked him because they were at odds with the culture of taste, were what enabled Africans to transcend the ontology of enslavement.

  Students of slave culture have been unanimous in their claim that dance and the noise that accompanied it marked the phenomenological presence of Africanness among the slaves and masked this other cultural self from the gaze of the planters. Sterling Stuckey aptly notes that as a form of expression, dance “was the most difficult for slaveholders to suppress.”104 And Sylvia Wynter has observed that the drum, “central to African religion and belief, became a focal point of the physical and cultural resistance” among the slaves.105 Because of its sense of deviance, this black sound and the movement it provoked—the drum and the dance—became a source of anxiety and fear across the slave world. The drum and dance became the targets of repression by the apparatus of enslavement, and the institutions of white power lived in fear of the African sound, which they went about repressing systematically and uniformly. Drumming, for example, was banned in South Carolina in the aftermath of the Stono Rebellion of 1739. Farther south, in Argentina, public dances by slaves, known as candombes, were banned three times in the last half of the eighteenth century.106 In Brazil, candomble, the dance of the slaves, was banned at the beginning of the eighteenth century.107 In many states in the antebellum South, black dancing was controlled by acts of the legislature.

  What threat did the drum and dance pose? The explanation that quickly comes to mind is pragmatic: drums were used to signal insurrection, and dances provided cover for organized resistance. And there is no doubt that in the major slave rebellions from Haiti to South Carolina, drums were used to spread the language of insurgency, and dance would provide an alibi for prohibited assembly. But pragmatic explanations should not detract us from the aesthetic or counter-aesthetic work performed by the drum and dance in articulating the ontological authority of a much-maligned blackness. Simply put, the drum and dance were performing aesthetic work that was invisible to the naked eye of white observers, who were already prisoners of their own standards of judgment and taste.

  Where white masters saw African barbarism or instruments of revolt, slaves perceived the work of art as their last connection to lost and soon to be forgotten homelands.
Observers of slave culture were struck by the fact that in both its style and function, the African dance deployed movement as part of an aggressive claim to physical space and as a community-building project. One of the stylistic features of the dance in West Africa, which American slaves came to value immensely, was the organization of the dancers in a circle. Writing of West African dance at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Barbot noted that black dances were performed in a circular movement, and this is what enabled their sensuousness: “Some of them stand in the middle of the ring, holding one hand on their head, and the other behind their waist, advancing and strutting out their belly forwards, and beating very hard with their feet on the ground. Others clap their hands to the noise of a kettle, or a calabash fitted for a musical instrument. When young men, or boys, dance with maidens, or women, both sides always made abundance of lascivious gestures; and every now and then each takes a draught of palmwine to encourage the sport.”108

  This so-called circle of culture was to become even more important in the slave plantation, where enslaved Africans, deprived of their sovereignty and “the deep, horizontal comradeship” that enabled the imagined community of the nation, considered an aesthetic community to be an imperative for survival.109 Slaves used dance to clear or create a social space where new connections could be made and rehearsed in public. With enslavement experienced and conceived as a traumatic moment of rupture, dance was embraced as the visible form of the black aesthetic and a technology of reconnection. Reporting on the West Indies, the French priest Jean Pierre Labat, did not find the Calenda, a Congolese ring dance, entertaining, but he did notice both the organization of the dancers in a circle and the intimacy it engendered: “The dancers, men and women, form a circle and without moving about they do nothing else but to raise their feet in the air and strike the ground with a sort of cadence, holding their bodies bent toward the ground, each in front of the other. They intone some story that one of their number tells, to which the dancers respond with a refrain while the spectators clap their hands.”110 And in his description of Congo Square in New Orleans, Latrobe, who found black dance generally repulsive was nevertheless struck by its symmetry: “They were formed into circular groupes in the midst of four of which, which I examined (but there were more of them) was a ring, the largest not 10 feet in diameter. In the first were two women dancing. They held each a coarse handkerchief extended by the corners in their hands, and set to each other in a miserably dull and slow figure, hardly moving their feet or bodies.”111 Latrobe was probably describing the Bamboula dance, which was later drawn by E. W. Kemble for the February 1886 issue of Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine (fig. 6.11).

  What did these circular, intimate, sensuousness motions mean? Were they expressions of an African aesthetic—or even metaphysics—or simply the slaves' performance of the remnants of imaginary homelands? Performance and being seem to have been conjoined in dance, for wherever one went in the landscape of slavery in the Americas, Africans in bondage had a keen sense of how dancing—and the performance of identity in general—helped them articulate an imaginary homeland that was transcendental of the lived experience of enslavement. Thus dominant slave dances—the Calenda, the Bamboula, or the Juba, for example—were often given national designations; in their choreography and conception, dances were usually identified as belonging to a specific cultural group, not an amorphous mass. In a 1795 petition to the viceroy of Argentina, Congolese slaves in Buenos Aires invoked their right to “hold their functions in the manner of their respective Nations,” reminding the potentate that “each Nation performs its Dances according to its style and with all due propriety.”112

  A complaint from the Buenos Aires town council from the same period indicates that colonial authorities recognized the association between dance and the performance of nationhood and the dangers it posed to the established moral order: “It has been observed that in these dances the Blacks perform Gentile Rites of the places in which they were born, with certain ceremonies and speeches that they perform in their Languages. They put on the various Dances by which each Nation distinguishes itself.”113 And observing a slave dance in New Orleans in 1807, a bewildered Christian Schultz recorded the antics of what he described as “wretched Africans” performing “their worship after the manner of their country”: “They have their own national music, consisting for the most part of a long kind of narrow drum of various sizes, from two to eight feet in length, three or four of which make a band. The principal dancers or leaders are dressed in a variety of wild and savage fashions, always ornamented with a number of tails of the smaller wild beasts, and those who appeared most horrible always attracted the largest circle of company.”114

  But perhaps even more than their role in sustaining an ethne, black ceremonies functioned as a means of bringing together fragments of a scattered people, united as a social body, suspended above the pain of the everyday. The use of dance and ceremony as a counterpoint to the cruel and diabolical festivals of punishment and enforced labor discussed in previous chapters caught the attention of the French naturalist Alcides d'Orbigny as he observed a candombe in Montevideo in 1827:

  All the blacks born on the coasts of Africa gathered in tribes, each one of which elected a king and a queen. Dressed in the most striking manner, with the most brilliant outfits that one can imagine, and preceded by all the subjects of their respective tribes, these monarchs-for-a-day made their way to mass, then paraded through the city, and, gathered at last in the small square near the market, every one performed, each in his own way, a dance characteristic of his nation. I saw in rapid succession war dances, representations of agricultural work, and steps of the most lascivious type. There more than six hundred blacks seemed to have regained for a moment their nationality, in the heart of that imaginary country, whose memory alone,…in the midst of that noisy saturnalia of another world, made them forget, for one single day of pleasure, the pains and sufferings of long years of slavery.115

  6.11 E. W. Kemble, The Bamboula. Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, February 1886.

  More than an aesthetic palliative, however, the performance of national dances could be read as an orchestration of horizontal social relationships at odds with the hierarchical structure of enslavement. In terms of movement, slave dances could be interpreted as audacious attempts to rewrite the terms of the master/slave relationship, a repositioning of what was supposed to be instrumental control into a tactic of liberation. These performances could thus be construed to be what Certeau has defined as “transverse tactic”—strategies for survival that “do not obey the law of the place, for they are not defined or identified by it.”116

  Although it was considered indecent or transverse, this performance of black sensuousness demanded attention, and sometimes admiration, even from the planter class. Edward Long, who considered blacks to have no aesthetic sense at all, and whose overall project was to evacuate Africans from the order of culture and the human by associating them with pure negativity, grudgingly came to recognize poetry, style, and order in the dances of Jamaican slaves. Long's conclusion, which comes in a rare and odd passage in a work committed to the demonology of blackness, is worth quoting in detail:

  Their tunes for dancing are usually brisk, and have an agreeable compound of the vivace and larghetto, gay and grave, pursued alternately. They seem also well-adapted to keep their dancers in just time and regular movements. The female dancer is all languishing, and easy in her motions; the man, all action, fire, and gesture; his whole person is variously turned and writhed every moment, and his limbs agitated with such lively exertions, as serve to display before his partner the vigour and elasticity of his muscles. The lady keeps her face towards him, and puts on a modest demure look, which she counterfeits with great difficulty. In her paces she exhibits a wonderful address, particularly in the motion of her hips, and Heady position of the upper part of her person: the right execution of this wriggle, keeping exact time with the music, is esteemed amon
g them a particular excellence; and on this account they begin to practise it so early in life, that few are without it in their ordinary walking. As the dance proceeds, the musician introduces now and then a pause or rest, or dwells on two or three pianissimo notes; then strikes out again on a sudden into a more spirited air; the dancers, in the mean while, corresponding in their movements with a great correctness of ear, and propriety of attitude; all which has a very pleasing effect.117

  After spending considerable time in his book denouncing all aspects of black life, it is ironic that Long was willing to endow black dance with the values reserved for the culture of taste, applying a technical language to its movement, acknowledging slaves as masters of their bodies, and even admitting that effects could be pleasing. But my interest here is not what might have motivated Long and other white observers to recognize in dance what they had negated in other spheres of slave life; rather, I want to probe some of the ways African-derived performances in the landscape of slavery exemplified what Eugen Fink, Ute Saine, and Thomas Saine have called “the ontology of play.”118

  Writing on the relation between play and the nature of being, Fink and the Saines have argued that play is not simply an occasional interruption of the serious business of living, nor is it “frivolous and pleasurable nonsense” or an escape into the realm of fantasy; rather, play is “an essential element of man's ontological makeup, a basic existential phenomenon…a clearly identifiable and autonomous one that cannot be explained as deriving from other existential phenomena.”119 The ontological value of play is implicit in its capacity to function as a spontaneous act and vital impulse, one denoting a mode of “existence centered in itself.”120 And there is no doubt that spontaneous acts and vital impulses were salient features of the slaves' aesthetic and that rather than representing dissonance, the resulting free play enabled communal bonds. In one of the earliest descriptions of the Calenda, Labat noted that in the dance, the “ablest person sings a song which he composes on the spot on any subject he considers appropriate. The refrain of this song is sung by everyone and is accompanied by great handclapping.”121 Labat went on to describe the movements of the dance, which, he concluded, were “contrary to all modesty.”122