Slavery and the Culture of Taste

by Gikandi, Simon;

  What Labat failed to see, however, is how in its immodesty, the dance was aggressively challenging the social codes associated with the culture of the masters and in the process affirming a space of existence that the slaves controlled. When the city of New Orleans banned dancing the Calenda in 1843, it seemed to have recognized the subversive potential of play. If dances like the Calenda constituted a threat to the established order, it was not just because they challenged conventional morality or provided the cover for revolt and rebellion, but also because they transformed what Fanon would call “the lived experience of blackness” or, more precisely, its terms of representation.123

  If I may adopt Fanon's formulation further, the challenge facing the slave in the plantation complex was not how to assume the attitude of the master, but to initiate a “cycle of freedom” that went beyond the historical and instrumental condition of enslavement.124 The slaves' aesthetic did not just depend on a reimagination of Africa, as many scholars have suggested, but on a self-conscious act of dédoublement, a dissociation from the regime of work (hence the value of play) and a reversal of the lived condition of a blackness bonded to unpaid labor and an enforced morality. In their dances, complained town officials in Buenos Aires, slaves forgot the sentiments of the Catholic religion and renewed “the rites of the gentiles”; they then perverted “the good customs that their Owners have taught them, learn nothing but vices,” and, in the process, “the Republic is very badly served.”125

  But this was precisely the point: African performances in the new world could function as forms of resistance only if they were deployed as “gentile rites” at odds with the dictates of taste and its privileging of order and cleanliness. As a matter of fact, African festivals in the new world, ranging from the John Canoe (Jonkonnu) festival in Jamaica to the Pinkster festival in Albany, New York, seemed to consistently confirm the claim, associated with Bakhtin, that festivals enable a domain of cultural expression outside “official order and official ideology.”126 One of the central assertions in Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World was that the festival constituted an extraterritorial space of identity: “Abuses, curses, profanities, and improprieties are the unofficial elements of speech…. Such speech forms, liberated from norms, hierarchies, and prohibitions of established idiom, become themselves a peculiar argot and create a special collectivity, a group of people initiated in familiar intercourse, who are frank and free in expressing themselves verbally. The marketplace crowd was such a collectivity, especially the festive, carnivalesque crowd at the fair.”127

  Given what appears to be the totality of domination engendered by the plantation system, which regulated everything from romance to labor, childbirth to leisure, the prevalence of the carnivalesque among the slaves is an attractive place for what Max Gluckman once called “rituals of rebellion.”128 A striking feature of the organization of rituals of rebellion, Gluckman argued, was “the way in which they openly express social tensions: women have to assert license and dominance against their formal subordination to men, princes have to behave to the king as they covet the throne, and subjects openly state their resentment of authority.”129 But there was a powerful caveat in Gluckman's study of ritualized forms of rebellion: they expressed social tensions and incited debates about the distribution of power but did not question “the structure of the system itself”; ritual enabled institutionalized protest, which ended up renewing “the unity of the system.”130

  5

  And thus two questions arise: What could forms of play and rituals of rebellion do to the powerful system of enslavement, one in which the masters had total power and the slaves none? Could symbolic work leave a dent on this totalitarian edifice of modernity? Since my goal and challenge in the last two chapters of this book has been to recuperate existential freedom within enslavement, it is imperative that I raise the question of the subjunctive nature of play in relation to the institutions of power. And the first step in the process is to rehearse and question the general claim that the slaves' festivals represented an oasis of happiness and freedom in the midst of suffering and bondage. There is a need here to interrogate the accepted view that the carnivalesque in itself represents an alternative to the hegemonic system.

  This view is, of course, dominant in the study of European carnivals. In addition to Bakhtin, scholars such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Peter Burke have called attention to the role of carnival in reversing the established social order in terms that bear comparison to the situation of African slaves in the modern world. Le Roy Ladurie has described carnival in early modern France as “a prodigious cultural grafting,” as a perjurer of “various ills and sins,” and as a form of ritual cleansing.131 And in his study of popular culture in early modern Europe, Peter Burke describes carnival as the subalterns' symbolic inversion of the dominant regimen of representation and their opposition “to the everyday.”132 But did the transgressive nature of festivals in situations of bonded labor lead to a realm of freedom?

  For some scholars of slavery, play and performance enabled slaves to transcend their deracinating everydayness to enter into what Roger Abrahams called the elevated “experience of celebration.”133 Posited against the pressures of bondage, festivals could be used to recapture what Robert Farris Thompson labeled “heaven's glamour.”134 The distinguished Congolese scholar K. Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau has gone as far as to endow the festival with the capacity to transform the nature of meaning and truth itself. Festivals, argues Fu-Kiau, bring about change because they allow people “to say not only what they voice in ordinary life but what is going on within their minds, their inner grief, and their inner resentments”; parades “alter truth” and “see true meaning.”135 Still, one has to ask whether the extraordinary circumstances of enslavement in which the Africans found themselves in the plantations of the Americas could allow for an alternative regimen of truth.

  Slaves did not, of course, acquire real freedom through play, but there is compelling evidence that the performance of a counterculture of taste was essential to the transformation of enslaved Africans from chattel to subjects. A compelling example of performance as a form of symbolic resistance can be found in the history and transformation of John Canoe, a unique festival that sought to create an alternative social space through the appropriation and mimicry of inherited aesthetic forms. What makes John Canoe exemplary is that it presents us with a paradox. On one hand, as Sylvia Wynter has noted, John Canoe constitutes, in its persistence, longevity, and power, one of the most important cultural forms to have come out of slavery in the West Indies. Wynter has rightly labeled it a counterculture or counter-aesthetic.136 On the other hand, John Canoe had only a tangential relation to Africa. In fact, what struck most observers about its form was it indebtedness to European performances, especially Christmas festivals and, in its mimicry of the European saturnalia, John Canoe would appear to be just a displaced European aesthetic, just another version of the Christmas masque common in Europe since the Middle Ages, now transplanted to the slave cultures of the West Indies.137

  However, John Canoe was more than the slaves' version of the European saturnalia. According to Jamaican lexicographer Frederick Cassidy, the festival had a complex development and uncertain meaning, one that provides important pointers to the cultural entanglement that created the African diaspora.138 Consider, for example, the enigmatic geography of the festival. In one form or another, John Canoe was spread across several West Indian islands from the beginning of slavery in the late seventeenth century to the dawn of independence in the 1960s. The essential features of John Canoe were first identified by Sir Hans Sloane in 1707 and definitively named by Edward Long in 1774 and Peter Marsden in 1788, suggesting that the festival had been part of West Indian slave culture throughout the eighteenth century. John Canoe was present in almost all prominent accounts of Jamaica through the long eighteenth century, the nineteenth century, and the early twentieth century, attracting the attention of a diverse group of observers from Matthew Gregory Le
wis; Lady Nugent, the wife of the governor; and the American anthropologist Mary Beckwith.

  In contrast, reports of John Canoe in United States are scanty; the only traces of the festival are found in a tiny part of North Carolina, where its life was short.139 Why did John Canoe not take root in the antebellum South? Or to put it another way, why did John Canoe become such an important feature of West Indian slave society and not of the American South? Questions of geography are further complicated by the lack of consensus about the meaning and origins of John Canoe. Edward Long considered the dance to be “an honourable memorial of John Conny,” a West African slave trader and representative of the Prussian government at Axim on the Gold Coast.140 Cassidy traces the etymology of the word to the Ewe people of Ghana and speculates that it is a corruption of “Sorcerer Man.”141

  My concerns here are not, however, philological; rather, I am interested in the cultural work the festival was asked to perform as an aesthetic response to enslavement, which depended as much on the appropriation of the European Christmas festival as its mockery or deformation. In this context, three aspects of John Canoe demand particular attention. First, like other dances and festivals, John Canoe was perceived as a temporary respite from the regimen of slavery. It took place during the Christmas break, a season when, Janet Schaw noted, “the crack of the inhuman whip must not to be heard…nothing but joy and pleasantry to be seen or heard.”142 Lady Nugent, in the patronizing tone expected of the governor's wife, described the John Canoe festivities that she witnessed in Jamaica on December 25, 1801, as evidence of the slaves' “short-lived and baby-like pleasure.”143 All observers noted that this was the season of bacchanal and unbound pleasure; with its masked figures and exuberant music, John Canoe was a form of off-season carnival.

  Second, the character and meaning of the festival was predicated on its brazen imitation of what the slaves considered European—more specifically, English—forms of entertainment. Observing a John Canoe festival in Jamaica in the mid-1780s, Marsden noted that the men dressed in “the English mode, with cocked hats, cloth coats, silk stockings, white waistcoats, Holland shirts, and pumps” in a perfect imitation or mimicry of the eighteenth-century person of taste, and black male slaves danced minuets with “the mulattoes and other brown women.”144 Crucially, this imitation of the English mode was also a form of deformation. When slaves danced the minuet, Marsden noted, they did so with “a degree of affectation that renders the whole truly laughable and ridiculous.”145 Writing about ten years later, William Beckford noted that during John Canoe, mulattoes in Jamaica would hold public balls and “view with each other in the splendour of their appearance; and it will hardly be credited how very expensive their dress and ornaments are, and what pains they take to disfigure themselves with powder and with other unbecoming imitations of European dress.”146

  Third, John Canoe stood out as a cultural form because of its apparent disfiguration of the very aesthetic forms that the slaves were imitating. From its very beginning, Long noted in 1774, John Canoe, perhaps drawing on African masquerade arts, thrived on the grotesque. He further observed that during the Christmas holidays, in all the towns of Jamaica “appeared several tall robust fellows dressed up in grotesque habits, and a pair of ox-horns on their head, sprouting from the top of a horrid sort of vizor or mask, which about the mouth is rendered very terrific with big boar-tusks.”147 Among these fellows was a masquerader, “carrying a wooden sword in his hand…followed with a numerous crowd of drunken women, who refresh him frequently with a cup of aniseed-water, whilst he dances at every door, bellowing out John Connu! with great vehemence; so that, what with the liquor and the exercise, most of them are thrown into dangerous fevers; and some examples have happened of their dying.”148

  John Canoe had two faces and functions: one imitated the culture of taste; the other mocked it. The title character in the masque, the figure of John Canoe, tended to have what one anonymous observer called “two faces, different from each other.”149 One face imitated the measured manners of the European court; the other face, which was notable for its hideousness, was a distortion of the symmetrical form of the accepted aesthetic. Even when the John Canoe figure did not have two faces, its doubleness was implicit in the split between the masked head, “which is often rendered hideous by beards and boar's tasks,” and the “fantastic cut of their cloaths, often of silk and sometimes enriched with lace” (fig. 6.12).150 How does one explain this doubleness? One could argue that the economy of mimicry in John Canoe was also a form of mockery, one that enabled the slave to parody the culture of taste by confronting it with its ridiculous, unacknowledged side. In its menacing presence, John Canoe would mark black difference from the very culture that it was ostensibly imitating.151 On another level, however, John Canoe had a significant, though sublimated, relation to the Africa of the slaves' imagination.

  The latter aspect of the festival can be discerned more clearly if we reflect on the key transformations that were taking place in the structure and meaning of John Canoe in the course of the eighteenth century. For if John Canoe had indeed started an Africanist festival, one indebted to West African masking traditions, its name, whether drawn from the Ewe or, as Long had speculated, after a slave trader at Axim, registered the slaves' sense of belonging and unbelonging; it designated both the tenacity of African memory and its displacement, both continuity and rupture. Cynric Williams presented the acute bifurcation of John Canoe when he noted, in an 1827 account, that the custom was “African and religious, although the purpose is forgotten.”152

  Certainly some of the most apparent transformations in the festival were closely connected to fading African memories, but as slaves born in Africa died and were succeeded by Creoles, so did the semiotics of the festival change. Indeed, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, the aesthetic of John Canoe was primarily determined by a competition between African- and West Indian-born slaves, a fact that was accentuated by the arrival of Creoles fleeing from Haiti in the aftermath of the revolution in the early 1790s. Thus at precisely the point when John Canoe had become a central feature of colonial culture, one acknowledged by the rich and powerful who were now keen to show off the masquerade to European visitors, it had become a mark of the absence of Africa and its memories. And it was the festival's tenuous relation to Africa and its memories as much as the arrival of Haitian Creoles in Jamaica that enabled the semiotic transformations that were evident for most of the nineteenth century. In the early days of slavery, for example, John Canoe derived its moral value from an implicit association with African ceremonies, including the Yam festivals, which had attracted the attention of slavers on the West African coast as perverted forms of pleasure and religious ritual. Significantly, like earlier slave dances, the early John Canoe festival was an occasion to inscribe the distinctiveness of the different nationalities that had been brought together under the yoke of slavery. In 1769, Long records, “several new masks appeared; the Ebos, the Pawpaws, etc. having their respective Connus, male and female, who were dressed in a very laughable style.”153 As late as the 1790s, slaves were deploying the festival as a symbol of their real or imagined African nationalities, a point noted by an anonymous observer in the Colombian Magazine of April-October 1797: “The negroes from different districts in Guinea associate in parties and wander about the town, diverting themselves with their own peculiar singing, instruments.”154

  Increasingly, however, the festivals observed at the end of the eighteenth century and for most of the early nineteenth century were no longer part of the slave's attempt to commemorate Africa or to hold on to national identities. Significant changes were apparent even in the material objects of the festival and its costumes. Errol Hill notes that as the festival evolved in response to the changing institutions of the plantation, what had been previously seen as insignias of Africa—animal skins and horns, for example—were replaced by symbols of what could be described as the modern: “Military apparel replaced animal skins, models
of ships and great houses were carried on the head instead of horns.”155 Or as Richardson Wright put it, “John Canoe assumed a much more picturesque air.”156

  6.12 I. M. Belisario, “Jaw-Bone, or House John-Canoe, 1837–38.” From Isaac Mendes Belisario, Sketches of character, in illustration of the habits, occupation, and costume of the Negro population, in the island of Jamaica.

  By 1823, when Cynric Williams observed John Canoe in Jamaica, the festival seemed to have lost all of its oppositional force, reduced, as noted earlier, to pure mimicry. Indeed, Williams's description suggests that John Canoe had become a minstrel show performed to entertain the planter class and their guests rather than to affirm the slaves' sense of identity or being:

  They were all dressed in their best; some of the men in long-tailed coats, one of the gombayers in old regimentals; the women in muslins and cambrics, with coloured handkerchiefs tastefully disposed round their heads, and ear-rings, necklaces, and bracelets of all sorts, in profusion. The entertainment was kept up till nine or ten o'clock in the evening, and during the time they were regaled with punch and santa in abundance; they came occasionally and asked for porter and wine. Indeed a perfect equality seemed to reign among all parties; many came and shook hands with their master and mistress, nor did the young ladies refuse this salutation any more than the gentlemen. The merriment became rather boisterous as the punch operated, and the slaves sang satirical philippics against their master, communicating a little free advice now and then; but they never lost sight of decorum and at last retired, apparently quite satisfied with their saturnalia, to dance the rest of the night at their own habitations.157