Slavery and the Culture of Taste

by Gikandi, Simon;

  My premise, however, is that although there is a need to question the centrality of rituals to locate them within the overall context of bondage, it is hard to ignore the value slaves invested in cultural performances as a mode of resistance against the order of enslavement and the ideologies that informed it, including aesthetic ones. Simply put, performances represented the most visible presence of the slave on the public stage; it was in the field of play that slaves asserted their own sense of being in the world; it was here that they presented themselves in a public sphere and oriented themselves in time and space, often against the desire of the masters, to control the moral geography of the plantation. So while slave masters had their own reasons for focusing on rituals, their agenda should not detract us from the value of performed Africanisms as a tactic of survival, a mode of remembering, and, ultimately, a kind of antidote to enslavement.73

  Moreover, the planters' acknowledgment of, and sometimes enthusiasm for, African musical forms did not amount to an endorsement of a black aesthetic. Indeed, what often gives white witnesses credence is that their minute observation of Africanist cultural practices was motivated by the malignant desire to exclude slaves from the domain of modern culture and reason. Thus, even those witnesses who conceded that slaves had musical talent often went out of their way to point out what they considered to be the disjunctive, abnormal, and sometimes pathological nature of the end product. Ligon was struck by the fact that the music that seemed to give the greatest pleasure to the slaves was “one of the strangest noises that ever I heard made of one tone.”74 Sloane equated black singing to noise. Charles Leslie was startled by what he considered the promiscuity of the black dances that he observed in Jamaica in 1745 and was especially repelled by what he called the “very barbarous Melody.”75 Even the musical instruments used by slaves seemed to white observers to be perverted versions of well-known instruments, and this pervasion, it was argued, distorted musical form. Leslie noted that the slaves he had seen in Jamaica used an instrument he called a “Bangil” (banjo), which was “not unlike our Lute in anything but the Musik.”76 And writing from Antigua in 1789, John Lufman lamented, “Negroes are very fond of the discordant notes of the banjar, and the hollow sound of the toombah.”77 Neither observer bothered to reflect on the aesthetic possibilities of this deformation of accepted form.

  White testimony on black performances was underwritten by a paradox. On one hand, white observers were clearly fascinated by black music, dance, rituals, and other performances; otherwise they would not have devoted so much time and space to their representation. On the other hand, however, they considered black music and dance to be at odds with all accepted aesthetic norms. Music was one of the most prominent forms of art in eighteenth-century Britain, and it was expressed and performed in a variety of media, from chamber orchestra to theatrical musicals. But it was underwritten by what amounted to an aesthetic consensus, an implicit assumption that musical form, and the energies that informed it, should be harnessed through melody, rhythm, and harmony.78 Indeed, the discordance of African music—and its performance—seemed an affront to the ideology of music promoted by the culture of taste. The boisterousness of a black ensemble on a Cuban plantation (fig. 6.9) would appear to be far removed and at odds with the ordered structure of a concert or music party on the lawn of English royalty and the serene deportment of both performers and listeners (fig. 6.10).

  6.9 Negro Dance on a Cuban Plantation. Harper's Weekly (January 29, 1859), vol. 3, p. 73.

  6.10 Philippe Mercier, “The Music Party”: Frederick, Prince of Wales, with his Three Eldest Sisters, 1733. Oil on canvas. The Royal Collection © 2009, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

  When European observers, then, complained that African musical forms in the new world were devoid of rhythm, they assumed that harmony and order were the essence of true musical expression. In more extreme cases, pro-slavery observers were not even willing to concede the notion, popular in Europe since the early modern period, that Africans had musical gifts; the lack of harmony was used to deprive them of even this old claim. From his observations in Jamaica, Bryan Edwards complained that the prevailing opinion in Europe that blacks “possess organs peculiarly adapted to the science of musicke” was “an ill-founded idea.”79 Edwards argued that blacks did not have vocal harmony or a proper ability to play instruments. He asserted that he could “not recollect ever to have seen or heard of a Negro who could truly be called a fine performer on any capital instrument,” concluding that in general they preferred “a loud and long-continued noise to the finest harmony, and frequently consume the whole night in beating on a board with a stick.”80 As far as white observers were concerned, slave performances seemed to be discordant with established norms about art, morality, and associative behavior, and this provided the alibi for the evacuation of black expressive culture from the domain of taste. And yet these same observers continued, almost obsessively, to write about black performances, often creating the impression that they were the essence of slave life. Did planters and other white observers of slave culture focus on these performances because they were the most visible signifiers of black cultural expression, or were they insidiously attracted to them because they reflected white anxieties about play and the outward display of feelings?

  I think the case can be made for both perspectives. Performances were an essential part of African identity in the new world, but perhaps because of this very fact, they triggered deep anxieties among the planter class and its supporters, many of whom subscribed to the dominant aesthetic ideology of order and restraint. For example, travelers to Africa in the early modern period had noticed the significance of dance and festival as signifiers of community, cultural connections, and the cycle of life. Writing on his observations of the cultures of the Gambia in 1623, the English trader Richard Jobson insisted that there were “without doubt, no people on the earth more naturally affected to the sound of musicke than these people.” He noted that music permeated all aspects of social life and was central to the practice of statecraft. Wherever one went in the region, Jobson observed, court musicians, whom he compared to the “Irish Rimer,” would be found singing the praises of the king, his lineage, and his deeds. If the king or any important person came to visit the European traders on the banks of the Gambia, Jobson noted, “they will have their musicke playing before them, and will follow in order after their manner, presenting a shew of State.”81 Out of such reports, and perhaps from his own recollections of childhood, Olaudah Equiano concluded that his people were “almost a nation of dancers, musicians, and poets. Thus every great event, such as a triumphant return from battle, or other cause of public rejoicing, is celebrated in public dances, which are accompanied with songs and music suited to the occasion.”82

  When white observers described black festival arts in the plantations, however, they were also expressing a deeply rooted fear of the sensual as expressed through the black body. In other words, what frightened white observers about slave dances, for example, was its affirmation of sensuousness and the celebration of the body, elements that the culture of taste had tried to control, if not exclude from its domain. We see this fear of sensuousness in George Pinckard's description of a black dance in Jamaica at the end of the eighteenth century,

  The dance consists of stamping of the feet, twisting of the body, and a number of strange indecent attitudes. It is a severe bodily exertion—more bodily indeed than you can well imagine, for the limbs have little to do in it. The head is held erect, or, occasionally, inclined a little forward—the hands nearly meet before—the elbows are fixed, pointing from the sides—and the lower extremities being held rigid, the whole person is moved without lifting the feet from the ground. Making the head and limbs fixed points, they writhe and turn the body upon its own axis, slowly advancing towards each other, or re-treating to the outer parts of the ring. Their approaches, with the figure of the dance, and the attitudes and inflexions in which they are made, are highly indecent; b
ut of this they seem to be wholly unconscious, for the gravity—I might say the solemnity of countenance, under which all this passes, is peculiarly striking, indeed almost ridiculous. Not a smile—not a significant glance, nor an immodest look escapes from either sex; but they meet, in very indecent attitudes, under the most settled, and unmeaning gravity of countenance.83

  And yet, even as they expressed horror at the sounds they were hearing, white observers were quick to note the important cultural work being performed by disharmonious sound. Pinckard, for example, noted that although the songs were “harsh and wholly deficient in softness and melody,” they provided the slaves an alibi for associative behavior: “They assemble, in crowds, upon the open green, or in any square or corner of the town, and, forming a ring in the centre of the throng, dance to the sound of their beloved music, and the singing of their favorite African yell.”84 Songs and dances were clearly associated with the work of community building. As an anonymous writer observed in 1797, in Jamaica, song and dance provided occasions for different African groups to affirm their identity—”on these occasions the Negroes of each tribe or nation assemble in distinct groups with their several instruments.”85

  White observers were also fascinated by black performances because they provided a conduit for deeper cultural anxieties, those located in the zones of expression and affectivity, repressed by the culture of taste. This is evident in their obsession with Obeah or other occult practices among African slaves. In fact, descriptions of Obeah and other forms of magic functioned in a fascinating dialectic of attraction and revulsion. Observers sought to represent the practice as a mark of black difference and to locate it in the realm of the irrational, which, in their mind, defined the African. Obeah, which Bryan Edwards described as an “extraordinary superstition,” was considered so central to understanding the underside of the slave in Jamaica that detailed research on it was transmitted to the Lords of the Committee of the Privy Council in its discussions of the slave trade.86 Obeah was such a great source of fear among the colonial ruling class that its practitioners were often sentenced to death by burning or transported to penal colonies.87

  However, despite the attention it was getting from the highest levels of the British government and members of the planter class alike, Obeah was an occult practice that was barely accessible to white observers; indeed, it drew most of its power from its invisibility. Paradoxically, this invisibility also made it even more appealing to the white imagination; inaccessible in a descriptive sense, it could be rewritten as a ghost story. This was at least the case with Matthew Gregory Lewis, who was already a renown Gothic novelist by the time he arrived in Jamaica to inspect his properties twice between 1815 and 1818. In his representations of Jamaican slave society, Lewis put his imagination to good use. Writing in the Journal of a West Indian Proprietor, Lewis represented Obeah as what Errol Hill, writing in a different context, has aptly described as “a drawn-out theatrical performance.”88 Not only did Obeah practices dominate Lewis's journal, but they were also often retold as ghost stories.

  One such story revolved around the exploits of a slave named Plato, the organizer of a revolt in Jamaica, who had been sentenced to death for his actions but somehow still managed to deploy the power of magic posthumously. Lewis retold Plato's story with the imaginary prowess of a Gothic novelist:

  He died most heroically; kept up the terrors of his imposture to his last moment; told the magistrates, who condemned him, that his death should be revenged by a storm, which would lay waste the whole island, that year; and, when his negro goaler was binding him to the stake at which he was destined to suffer, he assured him that he should not live long to triumph in his death, for that he had taken good care to Obeah him before his quitting the prison. It certainly did happen, strangely enough, that, before the year was over, the most violent storm took place ever known in Jamaica; and as to the goaler, his imagination was so forcibly struck by the threats of the dying man, that, although every care was taken of him, the power of medicine exhausted, and even a voyage to America undertaken, in hopes that a change of scene might change the course of his ideas, still, from the moment of Plato's death, he gradually pined and withered away, and finally expired before the completion of the twelvemonth.89

  Reading Lewis's journal one might conclude that Obeah was the key to understanding the moral economy of Jamaican slaves—but was it? As a Gothic novelist, Lewis was, of course, attracted to the ghostly as a source of stories, and his descriptions of Obeah are comical and ironical, often at odds with the terror associated with magic in the official narrative of Jamaican slavery. Nevertheless, his version of Obeah tells us more about his fertile imagination than about the lives of Jamaican slaves. Indeed, the role assigned to Obeah, as a source of either enchantment or danger, was based on a crucial misunderstanding. Planters and government officials alike seemed to believe that the African resistance to slavery and their determination to hold on to a set of values outside the regimen of labor were embedded in magic.

  Posited as a threat to the moral order and a display of a dreaded Africanism, Obeah was under constant surveillance on the plantation; but it was perhaps not as powerful as it was projected to be. According to students of Jamaican slavery, the real center of occult power among the slaves was Myal, a cult that resembled West African secret societies and which white planters often confused with Obeah. It was in Myalism that the African resistance to slavery was enshrined and an alternative set of beliefs cultivated. In fact, Myalism emerged as a counter to Obeah, developed its own complex, and, more importantly, was “shaped by a Christian presence.”90

  The often subtle but important differences between Obeah and Myal have been summarized by Orlando Patterson in The Sociology of Slavery. Patterson draws three distinctions between the two cultural practices. First, he notes that Obeah was primarily centered on individuals who acted on their own while Myalism had a corporate or group character. Second, he notes that Obeah was essentially “a type of sorcery which largely involved harming others” while Myalism was “a form of anti-witchcraft and anti-sorcery.”91 Third, while Obeah was discernible through the activities of its practitioners, Myalism was a secret cult centered on a special dance.

  These distinctions are important because they help us understand why planters, as products of the culture of taste, needed the manifestation of an irrational Africanism as a counterpoint to the cognitive faculties embedded in the aesthetic ideology. Simply put, planters were attracted to Obeah because they could associate it with what they considered an un-Christian, residual Africanism and because they could readily connect it with death and destruction and radical irrationalism. In contrast, Myalism was not easily classified, having always been part of a secret cult, deep underground, and, as Patterson notes, often associated with anti-witchcraft. While Obeah could easily be rewritten as a ghost story revolving around the activities of one individual (Lewis's Plato, for example), Myalism was spread across communities and was not easily contained; the secrets of the Myal fraternity, noted Edward Long, were guarded by oath.92

  From the slaves' perspective, Myalism was powerfully associated with life and community in two senses. In one sense, from the genesis of the cult, Myal priests had always claimed invulnerability. The 1760 Kromanti Rebellion in Jamaica was instigated by priests who provided the warriors with medicines that they claimed would protect them from bullets.93 In another sense, Myal priests were supposed to have the power to raise the dead. Lewis, who tended to confuse his Obeah and Myal, provided an insightful description of the task of raising the dead. He described a scene where, in the midst of “the Myal dance,” a priest would oblige a “devoted victim” to drink a liquor that would turn him or her into what he called “A perfect corpse”:

  The chief Myal-man then utters loud shrieks, rushes out of the house with wild and frantic gestures, and conceals himself in some neighbouring wood. At the end of two or three hours he returns with a large bundle of herbs, from some of which he squeezes
the juice into the mouth of the dead person; with others he anoints his eyes and stains the tips of his fingers, accompanying the ceremony with a great variety of grotesque actions, and chanting all the while something between a song and a howl, while the assistants hand in hand dance slowly round them in a circle, stamping the ground loudly with their feet to keep time with his chant. A considerable time elapses before the desired effect is produced, but at length the corpse gradually recovers animation, rises from the ground perfectly recovered, and the Myal dance concludes.94

  What Lewis did not understand was that the Myal dance, the centerpiece of the ritualizing of slave life that he was describing, was a form of both revelation and concealment. Indeed, by the first half of the nineteenth century, Myalism, its secret codes still undeciphered by the disciplinary powers, had appropriated a Christian idiom, which further concealed its mission. In 1842 what Patterson has described as “a remarkable outbreak of Myalism” took place in Jamaica. According to one eyewitness, Myal people, also calling themselves “angel men,” went around the island proclaiming the end of the world and vowing to root out the evils of Obeah.95 Yet few white observers, obsessed with the danger of Obeah, noticed the purifying claims of Myal.