Dancing in the Streets
Page 17
Within Europe, the intent of post-Reformation cultural “reform” was not to destroy the celebrants, only the celebrations. There, the overriding political-economic context was the rise of absolutism and, later, industrialization, within each of which emerging systems the European lower classes had an important part to play: as soldiers in the mass armies of absolute monarchs, and as workers in manufacturing enterprises. Their fate was to be disciplined, not necessarily to die. But the colonial context was, in large portions of the world, unabashedly murderous, comprising, as Tom Engelhardt wrote, a “single, multicentury, planetwide exterminatory pulse.”28 The analogue of the European worker was the colonial slave, and in places like South America and the Caribbean, slaves who were worked to death could readily enough be replaced. In settings where the conquerors and colonizers had no use for the indigenous population even as laborers—in Australia or the western part of the United States, for example—the natives were simply in the way, and the progress of “civilization” could be measured by their disappearance. In a recent book, Mark Cocker puts the death toll from four centuries of European imperialism at 50 million, an impressive figure even by twentieth-century standards of genocide.29
In this context, the missionaries who almost everywhere accompanied the conquerors sometimes appear almost as noble and altruistic as they imagined themselves to be. Their mission, after all, rested on the belief that native peoples had souls to save, meaning that they were in fact human. British missionaries often opposed the slave trade and sometimes slavery itself; in Australia they protested settler rapes and massacres of Aboriginals. In South America, Jesuit missionaries were seen by colonial authorities as too protective of the mission Indians they had converted, and were expelled from the entire continent in the late eighteenth century. For their part, secular authorities sometimes opposed missionary efforts, particularly those directed at African slaves in the Americas, out of the fear that slaves might take the liberatory themes of Christianity to heart. Until the religious revival of the mid-eighteenth century, many North American slave owners vigorously resisted the conversion of their slaves, who could be flogged for attending Christian prayer meetings or even praying in private.30 Or they offered their slaves only a twisted form of Christianity, as in this sample from a “catechism” devised for North American slaves:
Q. What did God make you for?
A. To make a crop.
Q. What is the meaning of “Thou shalt not commit adultery”?
A. To serve our heavenly father, and our earthly master, obey our overseer, and not steal anything.31
In some instances, secular authorities irritated missionaries by failing to suppress “heathen” collective rites with sufficient consistency and vigor: In Jamaica and Brazil, slave owners often permitted nocturnal dancing on the grounds that it kept the slaves content and, given its evident “lasciviousness,” possibly encouraged them to reproduce.32 In India, English colonial administrators initially opposed the entry of Christian missionaries, fearing that any challenge to Hinduism would threaten stability and hence imperial profits.33
But what is striking, in any overview of colonialism as a global enterprise, is the degree of concordance between conquerors and missionaries, between those who would exploit non-European peoples, their habitats, and their resources, and those who would “merely” destroy their cultures.34 “Imperialism is a matter of religion,” argued the English promoter of the missionary effort. “We need a Christian imperialism and a Christian commercialism. We also need an imperial Christianity and an economic religion.”35 Slave owners and colonial administrators may have cared little what gods, if any, their slaves and subjects worshipped, but they shuddered at the collective strength such rituals invoked and represented. Dance was “particularly distasteful to the Europeans, not only for its ‘salacious[ness],’” Comaroff writes, but because of the sheer “vitality of the system it represented,” a vitality that directly defied the aims of the white exploiters.36 And while individual missionaries may have had little concern for the profits of their fellow countrymen, they shared their dismay at the group unity so powerfully embodied in native ritual. John Mackenzie, sent to southern Africa by the London Missionary Society, wrote enthusiastically of “weakening the communistic relations of members of a tribe among one another and letting in the fresh, stimulating breath of healthy individualistic competition.’”37m
Black Carnival
The victims of European expansionism did not usually relinquish their traditions as swiftly and completely as the Europeans would have liked. Even under the crushing weight of imperialism and slavery, under circumstances of the most minute surveillance by colonial authorities, subject peoples sometimes found ways to preserve bits and pieces of their communal rituals and to invent new ones. The African diaspora to the Americas provides particularly striking cases of such cultural resistance, traces of which persist to this day, in the form, for example, of African-derived American music: blues, rock and roll, hip-hop, and jazz.
Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, at least 10 million Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas under conditions that would seem to have precluded the preservation of any cultural traditions at all: They arrived in the “new” world virtually naked, stripped of all cultural artifacts and kinship connections, thrown together with Africans of entirely different national groupings and languages: Yoruba, Dahomeans, Ibo, and others. Once settled on the plantations of white European and North American slave owners, they were worked almost ceaselessly and often forbidden to engage in any of their “heathen” practices, including dancing and drumming. Yet these tormented peoples managed, with great courage and ingenuity, to preserve some of their traditional forms of communal celebration and, beyond that, to use them as springboards for rebellion against white rule, much as the European lower classes had deployed carnival as an occasion for armed resistance to their rulers and landlords.
For the most part, Africans of the diaspora carried out this work of cultural preservation under cover of European institutions. Carnival, for instance, transported to the Americas by Catholic French, Spanish, and Portuguese settlers, was originally a white-only event, but appropriated by slaves for their own purposes. Christianity itself provided another disguise for African traditions and—when combined with remnants of African worship—a vehicle for ecstatic ritual. Both the secularized tradition of carnival and the Africanized versions of Christianity that arose in the Americas—Vodou,n Santeria, Candomblé, and so on—became sites of black defiance and, inevitably, targets of white repression.
Let us begin with carnival and other, somewhat secular festivities brought by Europeans to the Americas. These celebrations, which Europeans expected to carry on as vigorously—if not more vigorously—in the “new” world as in the old, posed an immediate problem in the colonial setting: What about the slaves? When Europeans caroused or simply feasted, there were always dark faces watching, waiting for some particle of generosity to come their way, or waiting perhaps for some moment of weakness to present an opportunity for revolt. In Protestant settings, such as Jamaica and the southern United States, where Christmas was the highlight of the social calendar, slaves used it as an opening to establish their own, probably African-derived festivity: Jonkonnu. As early as 1688, Jamaican slaves were celebrating Jonkonnu with costuming and dancing with “Rattles ty’d to their Legs and Wrists.”38 A little over a century later, they had won a measure of white respect for Jonkonnu, with whites agreeing to do their own chores during this brief period of black celebration. A white contemporary reported that during the holidays “the distance between [masters and slaves] appears to be annihilated for the moment, like the familiar footing on which the Roman slaves were with their masters at the feast of the Saturnalia, to which a West Indian Christmas may be compared.” 39 In the Carolinas, where Jonkonnu had spread by the nineteenth century, slaves marched to the big house, where they danced and demanded money and drinks from their masters. Thus a momen
t of white weakness—Christmas—was transformed into a black opportunity.
In Catholic settings, slaves encountered, and quickly exploited, a more robust version of the European festive tradition: a carnival period extending from Christmas not just to New Year’s Day but nearly to Ash Wednesday. The case of Trinidad is particularly well documented. There, carnival was initially a white celebration, imported by French settlers, and an occasion for so much uninhibited revelry that from 1800 on, martial law was imposed at Christmastime in order to contain the white mischief.40 People of color—slave or free—were barred from participation or confined to their own celebrations away from public spaces.
The free persons of Colour were subject to very stringent Regulations and although not forbidden to mask, yet compelled to keep to themselves and never presume to join in the amusements of the privileged class. The Indians kept entirely aloof, and the slaves, except as onlookers … had no share in the Carnival which was confined exclusively to the upper class of the community.41
For slaves who dared to break the law by wearing masks at carnival time, the prescribed sentence was “one hundred stripes … and it being in the night time, the punishment is doubled.”42 Perhaps these dire prohibitions were not entirely necessary: Slaves and freed blacks may have been sufficiently repelled by the peculiar white carnival custom of dressing as slaves—as “mulatresses” (slave women) or Négue jadin (male field hands).43
No doubt unwittingly, the Trinidadian whites had broken the rule propounded almost two millennia earlier in Rome: that elites do not engage in uninhibited celebration in front of their social inferiors without compromising their legitimacy as rulers. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Trinidadian blacks showed their disrespect by moving in on the white institution of carnival, finally achieving full participation in 1834, on the eve of emancipation, with an event transformed to suit their own culture and purposes. Blacks brought their own music to the celebration, along with African-derived symbolic imagery and their own mocking rituals of inversion. In the 1834 carnival, black Trinidadian marchers presented a parody of the island’s (white) militia—which whites, newly sensitive to racial caricature, found to be “in very bad taste.”44
A similar takeover of carnival took place later in Brazil, where, beginning in the 1880s, blacks used drums and tambourines to “initiate a new kind of carnival parading,” apparently derived from the slaves’ earlier practice of dancing at the funerals of African princes who died in slavery.45 In both Trinidad and Brazil, whites responded to black participation just as elites had responded to the disorderly lower-class celebrations of carnival in Europe: by retreating indoors to their own masked balls and dinner parties, which were invariably described as “elegant” by the local newspapers, in contrast to the “barbarous” celebrations of the blacks.
One strains to imagine the vitality and color of the great blackdominated carnivals of the nineteenth-century Caribbean. Unfortunately, we have only the disapproving accounts of white observers to go by, and these downplay the artistic creativity that went into costume making and choreography, to focus instead on the perceived violence, disorder, and lewdness of the events. A Trinidadian newspaper account from the early 1870s, for example, mentions the “brutish cries and shouts” of the celebrants, as well as the “horrid forms running to and fro about the town with flaming torches in their hands, like so many demons escaped from a hot place not usually mentioned in polite society.”46
We cannot even discern, in white accounts, what aspects of carnival were derived from Africa rather than Europe, since, as they grew more and more estranged from the festivities, whites tended to label any disagreeable elements “African.” In reality, some of the features of black carnival that whites found most disturbing would have been thoroughly familiar, at least in form and intent, to a celebrant of French medieval carnival—notably the rituals of inversion and mocking attacks on authority. Gender inversion, in the form of cross-dressing, seems to have been a common pleasure of Trinidadian carnival, with a (white) newspaper reporting in 1874: “As for the number of girls masked and in men’s clothing, we cannot say how many hundred are flaunting their want of shame. As many men, also generally of the lowest order, are in like manner strutting about in female dress, dashing out their gowns as they go.”47 In a more directly threatening way, black carnival participants used the occasion to insult the virtue of well-known white ladies and send up the entire plantocracy. As one historian reports, “Elaborately costumed revellers impersonated the Governor, the Chief Justice, the Attorney General, well-known barristers and solicitors, socially prominent cricketers, and other props of society.”48
In another striking parallel to the European festive tradition, Caribbean slaves and freed blacks put carnival to service as an occasion for armed uprisings. The historian Elizabeth Fenn reports that 35 percent of all known slave plots and rebellions in the British Caribbean were planned for the Christmas period, noting that “in this regard the slaves of the Americas differed little from the French peasants and laborers studied by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Natalie Zemon Davis.”49 An early Trinidadian slave revolt, on Christmas 1805, was blamed on slave societies, called convois, organized “for the purpose of dancing and innocent amusement.”50 In Cuba, similar groups known as cabildos, which were responsible for organizing carnival processions, hatched uprisings in 1812 and 1835.51 Even gentle Jonkonnu aroused white fears of rebellion. An 1833 novel by a former resident of Jamaica described the pre-Christmas military preparations undertaken in Kingston “in case the John Canoes should take a small fancy to burn or pillage the town, or to rise and cut the throats of their masters, or any little innocent recreation of the kind.”52
In Trinidad, carnival and any form of public black festivity came in for harsh repression in the 1880s. Fearful of the black response to an outright ban on carnival, the British attacked it piecemeal, itemizing their prohibitions on drumming, parading, dancing, masking, and even the carrying of lighted torches. Attempts to enforce these rules often led to violent clashes between revelers and the police, as at a celebration in Princes Town where dancing women mocked the police while others in the crowd of five hundred hurled missiles, “some containing foul-smelling substances.” The police opened fire, killing two, and a few months later attacked another festivity celebrated by East Indian immigrants as well as blacks, killing “many.”53
The Preservation of Ecstasy
Carnival provided one vehicle for the preservation of African traditions, religion another. How much of African theology and religious ritual survived the Middle Passage is a subject of keen scholarly debate. Uprooted from their shrines and holy places, deprived of opportunities for collective worship, slaves could not have brought much more than memories of their West African religious ideas and practices. Yet uprooted Africans, who were intended to occupy much the same spiritual—and often physical—space as domestic animals, cobbled together bits of Christianity and remembered fragments of their original religions to create entirely new ones: Candomblé in Brazil; Vodou, Santeria, Obeah, and Shango in the Caribbean. Even North American black Protestantism, to the extent that it offered (and continues to offer) a rhythmically engaging variation on the white version, served to keep alive African musical and communal approaches to worship.
Theologically, the larger “syncretic,” or hybrid, religions—Vodou, Candomblé, and Santeria—are defined by their use of the Catholic saints as a cover for a pantheon of African-derived deities. But it is the collective practice of these religions that concerns us, and this was, and remains, Dionysian, if we understand that word in the most ancient religious sense. These are ecstatic, danced religions, in which music and the muscular synchrony of dance are employed to induce a state of trance interpreted as possession by, or transcendent unity with, a god. To most European observers, the danced rituals leading to possession trance looked like madness, complete abandon, or sexual frenzy. A 1929 novel about Haiti, for example, offered the following overwrou
ght description of a Vodou ritual.
In the red light of torches which made the moon turn pale, leaping, screaming, writhing black bodies, blood-maddened, sex-maddened, god-maddened, drunken, whirled and danced their dark saturnalia, heads thrown weirdly back as if their necks were broken, white teeth and eyeballs gleaming, while couples seizing one another from time to time fled from the circle, as if pursued by furies, into the forest to share and slake their ecstasy.54
For all their ambivalence about ecstatic experience, anthropologists agree that the rites of religions like Vodou and Candomblé are in fact quite disciplined and focused. Alfred Métraux, the ethnographer of Vodou, whom we encountered in the introduction fretting over whether Vodou rites represented a form of hysteria, more accurately observed that
they are more like difficult exercises to which one applies one’s whole being, never allowing oneself to succumb to disorderly gestures. Ritual dictates that the gods be present at various times during the ceremony, and they never fail to turn up at the appropriate moment. Possession is therefore a controlled phenomenon obeying precise rules. It is considered to be unseemly for a god to “mount” a person who does not belong to the family giving the fete, and if he does so he is asked to go away.55