Jasminne Mendez is a Pura Belpré Honor Award recipient and a Dominican-American poet, playwright, and author of several books for children and adults. She is also a translator and professional audiobook narrator.
How would you describe this poetry collection/book to a friend?
What literary methods did you identify?
How does Mendez play with form in this book?
What textual techniques stood out to you?
In her website, Mendez highlights how the book “explores a different kind of “cutting” and what it means to feel othered because of illness, disability, and blackness. Ultimately, City Without Altar is a meditation on being/feeling “blacked out” by the archive, on the world stage and in one’s daily life.
The three-part collection consists of prose, poems, a theatrical script, and various forms of bureaucratic documentation—including a birth certificate, x-rays of Mendez’s hands over her multiple medical procedures, General Trujilio’s speeches fomenting the massacre, and maps of Hispaniola. These documents perform the critical work of witnessing a genocide that to this day does not receive its due attention, even while they gesture to the impossibility of communicating the horror inflicted on a country and on human bodies.
Historical Context
City Without Altar is a poetry collection and play in verse that explores what it means to live, love, heal and experience violence as a Black person in the world. The titular play in verse that sits at the center of the book seeks to amplify the voices and experiences of victims, survivors and living ancestors of the 1937 Haitian Massacre that occurred along the northwest Dominican/Haitian border during the Trujillo Era.
The collection begins by foregrounding the processes of, and resistance to, silencing. Mendez creates a poem by literally “blacking out” sections of her birth certificate. This gesture encapsulates Trujillo’s logic for the Massacre. “Hispanic” identity is constructed as the violent denial of Blackness: “Let the record show. I am. Hispanic. Not Black. This is legal. A record. Permanent.”
Describe the role of poetic condensation in Mendez’s historical account. What elements of the history does the poet highlight? why?
47:09
Thinking disability from a personal and historical point of view
Mendez brings her own embodiment to bear as she uses her experience of living with the auto-immune condition Scleroderma as a vehicle for examining the Massacre. Scleroderma causes the skin to harden and tighten, leading to ulcers, blood conditions, and inflammation.
Analysis in pairs:
Explore Mendez’s definition of Scleroderma (Pages 29, 46)
Why do you think Mendez decided to think and write about this condition and the massacre together?
(See pages 69-77)
How do the back and forth between the two types of narratives tell us about the legacies of racial violence in the present?
What is the significance of amputation and the scalpel/machete in personal and national narratives?
How do the inquiries into Dominican “cutting” let us see ongoing forms of eliminating blackness from the nation?
Class Exercise:
Discuss Mendez’s blackout poems (pages 5; 21-22). What are the poems trying to convey? What do the erasures tell us about the history of the Dominican Republic?
Create a blackout poem on today’s topic using one page of the following article:
Ramleela also spelt as Ramlila or Ramdilla is an open-air folk reenactment of one of the Hindu epics, the Ramayana. The text, originally written in Sanskrit, was re-written as the Ramacharitmanas in the vernacular Awadhi dialect of Hindi by Tulsidas in the sixteenth century (Riggio 2010).
The Ramacharitmanas or Ramayana, which has become the main scripture of Hindus in Trinidad, tells the story of Rama, one of the Hindu incarnations of God, a model of virtue and righteousness. During a self-imposed exile to avoid a family war, his wife Sita is abducted by the demon king of Sri Lanka, Ravana or Rawan. Aided by the monkey god Hanuman, Ram undertakes the rescue of Sita, a return home, and reclaims his throne.
The Ramleela takes place over 10 nights, usually 2-3 hours per night, during the Hindu festival of Navaratri, sacred to the goddess Durga. It ends with the burning of Ravana’s effigy to symbolize the triumph of good over evil. The popular Hindu festival of Divali, celebrating the Festival of Lights, follows the Ramleela performances. It is believed that the lights of Diwali originated in the villagers’ laying of clay lamps to light the path for Ram as he returned to Ayodhya after 14 years of exile.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Ramlila or Ramleela is a Hindu folk drama (Oxford University Press 2016).
Defining Ramleela as theatre, however, may be an inadequate Western secularization. Instead, we may need to imagine form of communal worship in which a ritual reenactment of a sacred text in a consecrated space teaches core concepts of dharma in an enjoyable medium. In this light, helping to stage Ramleela, taking part in the performance, and attending are all acts of devotion.
The Ramleela Legacy – From India to Trinidad
The mostly Hindu indentured laborers brought to Trinidad from India between 1845 and 1917 brought Ramleela to the island as part of their cultural heritage. The Ramleela began in Trinidad soon after the arrival of the indentured laborers, starting around the 1880s. Even under the harsh conditions of indentureship, they were able to maintain the traditional performance of Ramleela, and even non-Hindus participated (Crowley 1957, 822).
Local communities organized, performed the ritual to readings of the text, and crafted the costumes and props. Performances originally took place in rural playgrounds or community playing fields and while some have moved to more urban areas in more recent times, it’s still largely a rural affair. Some especially noteworthy villages or town associated with Ramleela are Felicity and Dow Village in central Trinidad, and further Palmiste and Avocat in the south. Formal organization has been a recent key development, and at present there are thirty-seven Ramleela groups registered with the National Ramleela Council of Trinidad and Tobago Inc. (NRCTT Inc.), the main body that plans and organizes annual Ramleela performances in the country (NRCTT 2015).
Derek Walcott brought tremendous national and international awareness to Ramleela in his Nobel lecture for his 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature. He opened his lecture by detailing his experience attending Ramleela in Felicity, Trinidad. He compared the Trinidad Ramleela with the Ramleela of India, asserting that “the performance was like a dialect, a branch of its original language, an abridgement of it, but not a distortion or even a reduction of its epic scale” (Walcott 1992).
The Ramleela was proclaimed by UNESCO in November 2005 as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity (UNESCO Press 2005).
Such recognition as helped to catalyze academic interest in Ramleela and even led some to speculate whether it can be marketed as a key regional player in religious tourism.
Challenges for Ramleela in Trinidad
Lack of State Support
Ramleela is financed largely at the local level by the village organizations that sponsor them. Additional significant revenue is sourced through the on-site sale of delicacies, clothing items and toys during Ramleela events. The state has provided sporadic and insufficient funds beginning only in the 2000s.
Geographical and Cultural Marginalization
Indo-Trinidadians live predominantly in rural areas, a legacy of indentureship in the sugar plantations. Rural underdevelopment and lack of proper infrastructure means that Ramleela remains more inaccessible to a national audience.
Unlike Carnival, Ramleela has not been proactively ingrained in the national cultural fabric. Trinidad has tended to promote and fund aspects of creole culture as the national culture, historically marginalizing Indo-Trinidadian expressions. Apart from the lack of state funding, events are not televised and there is no inclusion in school curricula. The religious and pedagogical nature of the event—alcohol and meat are forbidden; Ramleela teaches various ideals of Hinduism—may make participation less attractive to non-Hindus seeking a Carnivalesque experience.
Lack of documentation and archiving
Although Ramleela has been celebrated in Trinidad for approximately 171 years, documentation and archival practices exist, but are not very extensive. There are more secondary than primary source data available. There was no evidence of any formalized archiving system or special collections dedicated to Ramleela in any of the major library or archival systems, including governmental organizations.
“The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory”
Derek Walcott underscores in his Nobel prize discourse the resilience and creativity of Caribbean cultures, which, despite historical challenges, have evolved into vibrant syncretic expressions. Captured and indentured tribes, stripped of their original language, ingeniously crafted hybrid languages blending Asian and African elements. Walcott suggests that this linguistic transformation mirrors the poet’s daily quest for new metaphors, illustrating an ability to adapt and create. Renaming places and finding new metaphors became integral to this cultural adaptation. The Antillean experience, argues Walcott, is characterized by a “shipwreck of fragments,” a mix of partially remembered customs and tribal vocabularies surviving the Middle Passage and the arrival of indentured Indians. This context is vividly reflected in cities like Port of Spain, embodying a babel of cultures, mongrelized yet strong, offering a writer’s heaven of diverse experiences and narratives.
Within these inspiring multicultural experiences, Walcott centers the Ramleela in the introductory paragraphs. His main points are:
Spatial Context: Felicity, a village in Trinidad with a predominantly East Indian population, is described as the setting for a Ramleela performance, which dramatizes the Hindu epic Ramayana. Derek Walcott highlights the beauty and significance of witnessing such a performance in a community with strong Indian cultural roots. He suggests a theme of impermanence and renewal through ritualistic sacrifice.
Cultural Encounter: Walcott, unfamiliar with the Ramayana, contrasts his experience with adapting the Odyssey for an English audience, highlighting the cultural diversity and lack of knowledge about Indian epics among non-Indian Trinidadians.
Authenticity and Belief: Walcott describes the actors in the Ramleela as believers, highlighting their genuine faith and commitment to the sacred story they are portraying. This contrasts with the author’s initial perception of them in a play as performers (in the Western sense).
Cultural Misunderstanding: Walcott reflects on his initial tendency to view the Ramleela through the lens of historical and cultural loss, attributing this to his habit of seeking elegy and loss in Caribbean cultural events, which he realizes is a misunderstanding of the genuine joy and conviction of the participants.
Natural Beauty: The description of the scarlet ibises in the Caroni Swamp and their blending with the imagery of the Ramleela performance symbolizes the natural beauty and cultural richness of the Caribbean, suggesting that such beauty transcends historical narratives of loss and fragmentation.
Carnival is ancient, from Egyptian rituals and Roman Saturnalia to the various festivals of the Middle Ages. It celebrates fertility, excess and consumption through satirical inversions of the social order and power hierarchies. In the Middle Ages, the most important carnival was celebrated before Lent, a period of fasting and religious introspection. The word “carnival” comes from the Latin, “carn”—meat and “levare”—to remove to pull away from meat or flesh during Lent.
Carnival in Trinidad has evolved over two hundred years out of the masquerades brought to the island by the French fleeing Haiti, elements of West African culture that survived through slavery, the cultural expressions—especially musical ones—of Indian indentured immigrants, American interventions in the island, and government financial backing.
The Haitian French—white and free persons of color—who came to Trinidad following the 1783 Cedula de Poblacion, brought their love of entertainment and fetes, particularly the masked ball. The masked ball itself was an import from Venice, famous for its great Carnival that included traditional character costumes and licentiousness made possible by the masked face.
In the Caribbean, these masked balls occurred indoors, and slaves were barred from participating. The formerly enslaved, however, brought the festivities outdoors, taking to the village and city streets and creating some of the key figures associated with traditional Carnival.
“Canboulay” from the French “cannes brulées” or “burnt canes” is the precursor of modern Carnival. In the pre-emancipation period, it was the festival marking the end of the harvest season with music and dancing.
Black Trinidadians added numerous other elements and characters to their public fete: the “Negre Jardin” or field slaves who extinguished fires in the cane fields; JabJab or devil from French “diable”; moko jumbie or ghost figures on high stilts; stick fighters; limbo dances; minstrels; midnight robbers; burrokeets or horse men; Dame Lorraine, the voluptuous elite woman; and later sailors and fancy sailors.
By the 1940’s the Canboulay was replaced by the Dimanche Gras or Fat Sunday, Carnival Sunday, the first one occurring in 1948.
Band designers or “mas men” spend the entire year conceiving their band’s theme and designs. Actual production and festivities ramp up after New Year’s. Steelpan bands rehearse and admission-only calypso concerts or “tents” begin. The actual Carnival celebration occurs over the Saturday through Tuesday preceding Lent.
Saturday is Panorama, the competition among large steelpan bands playing out versions of the year’s calypso and soca songs. For Dimanche Gras, Fat Saturday, the male and female leads of each Carnival band parade their costumes in Queen’s Park Savannah before crowds and judges. They are judged on the aesthetics of their costumes and their ability to embody and communicate the band theme by animating their costumes through movement and dance, and a King and Queen of Carnival are crowned.
Carnival Monday morning begins with J’ouvert, from the French, “jour overt”—daybreak. This is not pretty mas but a raucous throwback to the early days of Canboulay: Revelers cover themselves in black grease or dirt; don rags, drag, or infant clothing; or assume traditional characters such as JabJabs or Moko Jumbies to parade through the streets. The Calypso Monarch is also picked on this day.
Mardi Gras, Carnival Tuesday, is the culmination of the entire 4-day event. Revelers dress in full costumes and march in their bands, with costumes based on a specific theme. They dance and wine their way through the streets of San Fernando to Skinner’s Park and of Port-of-Spain to the Queen’s Park Savannah, where participants are judged for best mas band costume and individual street parade costume. The Road March King or Queen is crowned for the singer whose song was played most frequently through the day.
Peter Minshall, Mas Man
Peter Minshall is universally recognized as the greatest Carnival band designer or “mas man”. He revolutionized Carnival as a vehicle for epic conceptions played out over years, the costumes and their movements, and choreography of the spectacles and band leaders. He has taken the Carnival paradigm global, designing the ceremonies for Olympic games, Superbowl events, and major awards ceremonies. He has won more “band of the Year” titles than any other designer, Trinidad’s highest awards, an Emmy award, and even the Prince Klaus of the Netherlands Award for his contributions to world culture through Carnival.
Born in 1941 in Georgetown, Guyana, he moved to Port-of-Spain, Trinidad as a small child where he was first exposed to Carnival. He made his first costume as a young teenager. He attended Queen’s Royal College, the leading secondary school in Trinidad, then studied Theatre Design at London’s Central School of Art and Design.
His Carnival career began in 1974 when he designed a costume, From The Land of the Hummingbird, for his adopted sister. Ornate, detailed, and allowing the wearer total mobility, it became referential in the history of Trinidad Carnival.
For Minshall, Carnival is public art and theatre on a massive scale that takes on big issues, from the historical, the ecological, the existential, to the cosmic, but always rooted in and informed by a Trinidadian context. For instance, he based his first band,1976’s Paradise Lost, was on John Milton’s 17th century epic poem of the same name. However, he drew heavily on the traditional bat and JabJab characters for his costume designs. As theatre, the performance unfolded over four sections or movements over the days of Carnival.
He continued to develop his conception of public theatre, culminating in the 1983-1984 trilogy widely considered his greatest achievement. It began with River (1983), whose queen, “Washerwoman”, represented life and purity. The band king, “Mancrab”, represented greed and technological madness.
Minshall conceived and executed a grand narrative in which these two warred for the souls of the River People, played by the band’s masqueraders. On Carnival Monday, the River People paraded in the streets dressed in white cotton, representing their pure and uncorrupted state. They moved under a white canopy, a visual marker of the river, three-quarters of a mile long. Carnival Tuesday showed the River People, still dressed in white, parading under a rainbow canopy created by Mancrab. He defeats Washerwoman, whose lifeless corpse signals the pollution of the River People dramatized by the different colors of paint they spray at each other.
The River trilogy continued the story with 1984’s Callaloo, portrayed as the son of Washerwoman who came to lead the fallen and polluted River People. The epic culminated in 1985’s The Golden Calabash that staged the inconclusive clash between two bands, Princes of Darkness and Lords of Light.
As a sign of the ways Minshall was pushing the boundaries of Carnival’s work and expressive form, his Rivertrilogy won no titles. Some judges were perplexed by the notion of a grand narrative playing out over all the days of Carnival and over multiple years. Others resisted what they saw as a foreign conception overtaking the primary functions of Carnival—steam valve social release and festivity.
Minshall responded to such criticism with a sarcasm that reflected national social, economic and political troubles. In Rat Race (1986), he costumed revelers as long-tailed rodents invading Port of Spain whose king, Man Rat, represented the insanity of modern technological excess. He staged Carnival Is Colour (1987) whose reliance on abstract geometrical forms was his response to criticism that he invested Carnival with too much meaning. Ironically, it won band of the year. Jumbie (1988) and Santimanitay (1989) were characterized by sinister, malevolent spirit figures and effigies.
The mid-90s saw Minshall’s second Carnival trilogy: Hallelujah (1995), in Song of the Earth (1996) and Tapestry (1997), a prayer of thanks to the divine for the gift of life. He drew on religious iconography and figures from Trinidad’s diverse peoples and Carnival’s long history.
The culminating spectacle of Tapestry featured a “cavalry” of traditional burrokeets or donkey-men, winged stilt-walkers who combined the characters of Moko Jumbie and bat; a 2-foot-tall golden Weaver of Dreams; a Black Madonna who was mask and huge skirt evoked the Madam Lorraine; and an effigy of the Hindu god Shiva, Lord of the Dance, that spring to life, amazing onlookers. The visceral impact led state TV to suspend news programs so the country would watch uninterrupted. Journalists reported that spectators wept in humility and rapture. Minshall, in a deft Aristotelian stroke, produced national catharsis by using Carnival to manifest the divine presence that made church and street the same.
Minshall revolutionized Carnival not only in terms of its theatricality and ability to take on epic themes, but in costume design. He pioneered costumes, particularly for the band king and queen, that come alive with the performer’s movements. This resistance to static costumes embodies his belief that Carnival expresses the body’s primal energy.
He carefully choreographed the band king’s and queen’s key movements across the Carnival stage to ensure that these movements animate both the costumes and his conceptions. Saga Boy and Tan Tan, the king and queen of his 1990 band, Tantana, wore 16-foot fully mobile puppets who danced through the streets to enact their romance.
Mas for Minshall is living art that Trinidadians make fresh every year. The Trinidadian aesthetic is performance itself, and performance is none other than life in the present moment.
Written Reflection
Option 1
In the film, “Mas Man”, one critic characterized Peter Minshall’s work as inappropriate to the genre by staging the negative side of the human experience, most significantly in his River trilogy, or going too “high concept” by staging questions and concerns of epic proportions—good vs evil, technology vs humanity, the ephemeral nature of existence. Engage this idea—based on your viewing of the film and the scope of his work represented there, to what extent do you agree or disagree?
Option 2
Reflect on the two videos on J’ouvert in Trinidad and Kanaval at Jacmel, Haiti. What similarities do you notice and what differences seem significant? What social function do these Carnival expressions seem to fulfill? How do they challenge your understanding of Carnival?
Option 3
Devise your and respond to your own prompt! Alternatively, you can formulate a set of questions and show how these arose from specific scenes or moments in the various films you viewed.
Filmmaker Rhea Storr offers an ecstatic immersion into Junkanoo—a form of carnival celebrated in the Bahamas and a living expression of Afrofuturism as resistance.
Three Keywords:
Radicalcomes from a Latin word meaning “root,” in its earliest uses, it refers to roots of various kinds, first literal and then figurative. Because roots are the deepest part of a plant, radical came to describe things understood as fundamental or essential. In phrases like “radical reform” and “radical change,” radical implies a shift in the most basic or necessary part of something.
Tanisha G. Hill-Jarett says the “radical imagination entails stepping outside the confines of the now and into the expansiveness of what could be. It has been described as the ability to dream of possible futures and bring these possibilities back to the present to drive social transformation.” She proposes three processes that comprise the radical imagination: (1) imagining alternative Black futures, (2) radical hope, and (3) collective courage.
Hill-Jarett elaborates, “Afrofuturism intersects with the Black imagination to provide a framework for communicating ideas around possible futures and creating spaces of Black empowerment. Afrofuturism is an epistemology and artistic expression that explores the African diaspora experience through alternate realities and futures using imagination, technology, and mysticism. Afrofuturism reasserts Black agency in a way that places African diaspora people as central story writers and occupants of the past, present, and future. “
Discussion Questions
.What does it mean to have and cultivate a radical imagination within the context of the Bahamas?
.Why is carnival a vital space to experience collective world-making?
.How does the short documentary understand and perform Afro-futurism?
.What visions of the future do you see performed in carnivals?
Describe the importance of son and hip hop in shaping the cultural identity of Black Cubans.
What patterns did you identify in the state responses to son and hip-hop? What differences?
What contradictions does the embracing of the son music genre by the state and cultural elites present?
Why is hip-hop in tension with the official discourses of racial equity in Cuba after the revolution?
In what ways do these musical genres serve as forms of resistance and cultural expression?
In this vibrant “son,” the lyrical persona exudes confidence, boasting about his good looks and “Paran Pan Pan” skills as the ultimate dancer and “cumbanchero.” The chorus joyously declares that his dancing style and infectious party spirit are celebrated everywhere in Cuba. Specifically, the song highlights the enthusiasm of Black women, who are portrayed as being enthralled by his rhythm and sabor. In an inclusive gesture, he invites Black women to join him in dancing, emphasizing the shared joy and connection in their spirited dance.
The song features a narrative from a black schoolboy, the son of a construction worker, who reflects on the class disparities. He contrasts himself with the sons of doctors, noting their attire of Adidas shoes and expensive cologne. At school, he faces negative stereotypes related to his race and economic background, being labeled as a thief, poor student, dishonest, and disrespectful. In contrast, the doctor’s son is revered and respected. When some math tests go missing, the black schoolboy humorously remarks that he is automatically blamed, joking that the only reason he passed was by cheating. Clan 537 uses this story to highlight social inequality and racial discrimination issues. The repeated reference to the construction worker’s son as “negro” underscores the role of race in the differential treatment of black individuals in Cuban society.
Does this critique match what the rappers in Gates’ documentary series argued?
Hip-hop in Cuba
Hip-hop resonates in Latin America and the Caribbean because of its legacy of colonialism and slavery. The region’s rich oral tradition is connected to the stories of people with African roots. Latin America and the Caribbean have the largest concentration of people with African ancestry outside Africa — up to 70 percent of the population in some countries. The region imported over ten times as many slaves as the United States and kept them in bondage far longer. Hip-hop in Latin America reminds us that African cultural contribution is often forgotten or ignored.
Hip-hop embodies a set of shared meanings and styles that indicate a widespread network of cultural practices transcending geographic boundaries. Rap lyrics, in particular, offer language, ideas, and insights for expressing similar yet unique challenges faced in different locations and eras. At the core of this interconnected space is the shared experience of marginalization, encompassing racial and ethnic prejudice, poverty, violence, and adversity. However, hip-hop’s integration into everyday struggles also leads to significant differences in local stories, influenced by the cultural environments in which it is rooted.
Cuba’s geographical and political isolation due to the U.S. embargo initially limited direct exposure to hip-hop culture. However, in the 1980s, television shows like Soul Train and various U.S. radio stations, which Cubans accessed through makeshift antennas, reached audiences nationwide. The 1980 Mariel boatlift, which allowed many Cubans to move to the United States, facilitated the exchange of cultural materials like cassettes and music videos between the two nations.
By the mid-1990s, Cuba’s relaxation of foreign investment policies and a global increase in world music sales led to a surge in contracts between Cuban musicians and international music labels.
Fernandes, Sujatha. “The Capital of Rap: Hip Hop Culture in Alamar.” The Cuban Hustle: Culture, Politics, Everyday Life. Duke University Press, 2020.
Written Reflection:
Option One:
Explore how one of the concluding paragraphs of Fernandes’s “The Capital of Rap: Hip Hop Culture in Alamar” encapsulates the article’s delineation of the various influences and concerns that amalgamated in Cuban rap:
Here, in a mansion-turned-culture-house, technology courtesy of the Soviets, Cuban rappers were reworking the ideal of revolution to encompass the kind of changes they wanted to see as a local and global movement. The Hip Hop Revolución drew inspiration from the Cuban Revolution and from Fidel, but it was also connected to the motherland. And perhaps this imagined connection to Africa was what kept rappers somewhat outside the orbit of the state, even as they continued to collaborate with it. The ties of Cuban rappers with French record labels and African American rappers, even with fans in San Diego and Montreal, gave them a level of recognition. When black American celebrities such as Danny Glover and Harry Belafonte came to Cuba to meet with local rappers, it meant that they were somebody. (69-70)
Option Two:
How do any of today’s materials relate to any form of culture or entertainment that you enjoy or participate in?
Option Three:
Create your own prompt. Is there a critical observation about the materials that you would like to explore?
Sujatha Fernandes’, “The Capital of Rap: Hip Hop Culture in Alamar” explores the origins and rise of Cuban rap. He begins by depicting the space in which the music and musicians emerge, Alamar: a massive concrete housing project designed by Russian architects and built by Cuban labor. He details the conditions of stagnation economically, spatially, socially that affect residents of the Alamar housing project. The word “project” is deliberate as it summons the specter of American housing projects built for poor and working minority communities. And this deliberate choice reflects the parallel that the article explores between the rise of rap in the South Bronx and later in Alamar.
However, the opening dwells on the physical, social, economic and cultural architecture of Alamar for a deeper reason. The project is essentially a foreign imposition on Cuba. It responds to a local need, but its physical design and the needs it is supposed to meet are foreign. The underlying metaphor of how Cubans inhabit this foreign construct is itself the project of this piece—showing how Cubans took rap and made it their own.
Fernandes notes both the original fascination with American rap and the dissonance experienced when trying to imitate the form. Cuban artists not only experimented with form, cadence and rhythm, meshing Cuban Spanish and English. They also needed to reflect their own economic, political, social, and racial realities that were different from the American context in which rap first developed.
For all the similarities, these differences were determinative. For instance, the American racial binary of white/black did not work in Cuba, which recognized many more racial categories. Cuba, a racially and economically stratified society, never had a civil rights movement, yet its Black youth had greater levels of educational attainment than African Americans. Similarly, the protest against materiality and commercialism didn’t translate—recall the incident in which M-1 burns American money on stage and the crowd protests the value and use of that money in Cuba. While both Cuban and American rap were protest music, American rap—long marginalized socially, culturally and as a musical genre–positioned itself in opposition to government policies while Cuban rap received state support and shared a protest stance and language with the state, even as it pushed against the state to go further.
These were the multiple local conditions and realities that differentiated Cuban rap from its American ancestor. Yet, what seems consistent between the two is the emphasis on airing and empowering the Black voice. And this resonates with two other important themes in the piece—first, the spiritual connection that Cuban (and African American) rappers established with Africa; second, the rise of rap as a way to dispel boredom that creates community in an otherwise depressed space. Where they seem to diverge most strongly in focus comes out of the mutual embrace of Cuban rap by rappers and the state: Cuban rappers reflect their state’s concern with international politics.
Discussion Questions:
What parallels and divergences do you see between the rise of rap in Cuba and of reggae in Jamaica?
How does Cuban rap negotiate its roots in protest music and state intervention in the organization of its cultural events?
Fernandes depicts rap as creating the conditions for positive inhabitation in Alamar. How do you assess this claim and does any evidence in the piece argue against this?
Dancehall Queen, written by Suzanne Fenn, Ed Wallace and Don Letts, and directed by Don Letts and Rick Elgood, tells the story of Marcia Green (Audrey Reid), a hardworking single mother whose subsistence-level existence as a higgler, or street vendor. To keep her family afloat, she depends upon the meagre financial assistance of Larry (Carl Davis), a gun-wielding don who poses as a family friend and uncle figure to Marcia’s elder daughter, Tanya, whom he desires sexually. Marcia’s life is further complicated by Priest (Paul Campbell), a criminal who killed Marcia’s friend, pushes her out of her vending spot, and terrorizes her and her vulnerable brother Junior. Marcia decides to resolve, or suspend, her three major problems–Larry, Priest, and penury—by learning the requisite moves and self-presentation and competing for the title of Dancehall queen as the Mystery Lady, and pit both of her male oppressors against one another.
The movie incorporates many genres such as 70s blaxploitation, 90s ghetto drama, and the fairytale while foregrounding the centrality of dancehall as a musical form inseparable from its physical embodiments of the male deejay and female dancer.
Made for the local Jamaican audience, it relies heavily on and relishes the expressions and musicality of Jamaican patois, which is strategically juxtaposed against Jamaican Standard English and the not infrequent code-switching and code-meshing. It resonated deeply with Jamaicans, becoming one of the top three highest grossing locally created movies in Jamaica.
Written Reflection:
Option One: Promotional materials and the DVD case’s back cover state that “Dancehall Queen is a modern-day Cinderella story, with no Prince Charming, but one very strong woman, backed by a pulsing reggae soundtrack and the scintillating sights of Kingston, Jamaica.” Reflect upon and assess this characterization of Marcia’s journey as a Cinderella story, the absence of a Prince Charming, and the Kingston sights as scintillating. Refer to specific details from the film to anchor your reflection.
Option Two: Compare how the directors of Dancehall Queen (Rick Elgood and Don Letts, 1997) and Lovers Rock (Steve McQueen, 2020) use various details of setting, sound atmospheres, wardrobe, character, and action to expose Jamaican music’s impact on dealing with gendered forms of violence or tensions internal to the diaspora. How do these music spaces help members negotiate and surmount these tensions and forms of violence?
Option Three: Create your own prompt. Is there a critical observation about the film(s) that you would like to explore?
Marcia works as a higgler, a pushcart street vendor in the slums of Kingston. Higglers originally were women from the rural areas who came to towns in Jamaica to sell the agricultural provisions they bought in the countryside. They functioned essentially as “middlemen” in the rural-to-urban supply chain.
However, the film depicts this public space of economic activity as also the space of male violence. Not only is her friend killed in the first 15 minutes, but she is also displaced and forced out of her usual spot. Bear in mind that customers associate a specific location with a specific vendor, history of interactions, and goods. This loss of space evokes a loss of identity that the film will transform into Marcia’s reinvention of herself as the Mystery Lady.
The female-headed domestic sphere
Marcia is the economically vulnerable head of her household, a female-dominated space that includes her two daughters and brother Junior. She stands in contrast to the prototypical virtuous and authoritarian woman controlling the domestic sphere and protecting it from the outside world. Yet, her gender explains the degree to which she is exposed to violence, displacement, and sexual extortion, but simultaneously not killed. Paradoxically she is not killed because Priest expects sexual payment from her in the future.
Economic displacement and marginalization seem to suspend normative values towards sexuality. We see this when she encourages her teenage daughter Tanya to sleep with Larry, someone Tanya sees as an “uncle” or “godfather” figure. These terms suggest the unreliability of traditional affinitive and kinship support networks.
An ironic inversion occurs in the film between Marcia and Tanya with the daughter performing tropes of the traditional authoritative and virtuous mother intent on resisting the incestuous sexual overtures of her “uncle” Larry. Yet, Marcia seizes opportunistically on the adultification of her daughter to pressure into having sex with Larry so he would continue to sponsor the family.
Dancehall: public, economic, sexualized space
Dancehall space, with its norms, mores, and financial rewards, appears as the space that collapses the sexual, economic, and public. In a strange parallel to Marica having Tanya bargaining sexual favors for family income from Larry, Marcia offers the performance of a promise of her sexual favors as a Dancehall Queen to secure income from the urban music scene. Bear in mind that while Tanya must actually have sex with Larry, Marica has only to dance in a way that suggests sexual availability without necessarily delivering it. Indeed, she uses this strategy to string Priest along.
As with the public economic sphere, Dancehall is dominated by men who own the venues, sponsor the events, gaze upon female performers, and stand behind the cameras to televise the event nationally. Women perform for men. They compete with other women—Marcia’s rivalry with Olivine—for men’s attention. The approving male gaze is what determines economic rewards in the form of prize money.
Dancehall and the Plantation Machine.
Two important themes and motifs in this movie center around Caribbean women: the higgler (female vendor) and the woman as provider of sexual service. It should not surprise us by this point that both of these have origins in the Plantation Machine: The history of rape and sexual servitude of slave women should be apparent. Regarding the higgler, slaves were allowed a market day on Sunday to sell the products of their food plots and or other items they had crafted or were handed down by their owners. The money made from market day was often used to purchase the freedom of the slave and or spouses and children. Equally likely, the master could appropriate these earnings as the slave, and thus the slave’s labour products of that labour, were by law the master’s property.
Lyrics and Music Videos
“Boom, bye-bye”- Buju Banton
“Muévelo, muévelo”- El general
Heterosexism and Homophobia in the Caribbean Dancehall Context
Instructions:
Discuss one of the following questions in pairs:
.How do the authors (Chapman et al.) characterize the role of dancehall music in protesting colonial history and inequalities?
.According to them, why is it vital to discuss the clashes between Eurocentric religious ideals and LGBTQ customs concerning dancehall?
.How does the article connect dancehall lyrics to hegemonic masculinity and heterosexism in Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago?
.What is the role of autobiography in analyzing dancehall lyrics?
.How does gender performativity theory help us understand the authors’s arguments?
.What concerns arose from the ‘Stop the Murder Music’ initiative, which urged sponsors to pull funding and to cancel bookings and venues for artists who produced anti-LGBTQ music?
.In what ways do the authors contribute to understanding the stigmatization, criminalization, and dehumanization of the LGBTQ community in Caribbean societies?
Lovers Rock is a 2020 film directed by Steve McQueen, an Afro-Caribbean Briton, who co-wrote it with Courttia Newland. The second installment in a 5-part thematically connected anthology of films known collectively as Small Axe depicts the lives, struggles, and joys of the Anglo-Caribbean diaspora that migrated to Britain in the post-World War II period.
The anthology explores the lives of children of the Windrush Generation through the setting of the 1960s—80s, the forms of code-switching and code-meshing characters perform, the fact that some characters were born in Britain and some in the Caribbean, and the fact that some still trace their origins to parishes and towns in specific Caribbean islands.
The Caribbean diaspora transformed all aspects of British society. First, it provided labor desperately needed in many industries, especially transportation, construction, and health. Second, it introduced Caribbean musical forms, rhythms, and cultural events, such as Carnival, revolutionizing British society.
However, trade unions excluded Afro-Caribbeans, pubs, and nightclubs refused to serve them, and housing was in short supply. Afro-Caribbean British children were often wrongly placed in special needs schools, as was Steve McQueen himself. They were often victims of attacks by organized groups of nativist vigilantes.
The anthology title, Small Axe, comes from the Jamaican saying that the tall tree must be wary of the small axe—that seemingly small actors and agents can overcome seemingly overwhelming opposition.
The film title, Lovers Rock, is taken from a 1970s genre of music popular in the Anglo-Caribbean and in areas of Britain, the USA, and Canada with significant Caribbean diasporic representation. The genre grounds itself in reggae baseline rhythms and incorporates the vocal stylizations of Philadelphia and Chicago soul. In Britain, and especially London, lovers rock was overtly apolitical in content, unlike reggae, focusing instead on love, romance, and the woman’s perspective. Women and female groups dominated the scene.
Lovers rock, however, is one of many forms of music represented in the film, including reggae, dub, soul, disco, and reggae covers of soul classics. Clearly, while Lovers Rock as a genre is foregrounded, signaling the importance of women and women’s concerns, it is in dialogue with various genres–and thus, by extension, several challenges and issues–from which it cannot be readily isolated.
Political Factors Involved in the Evolution of 1960-70s Jamaican Music
By the 1970s, the economy, still dependent on the former colonial arrangements, sputtered. Banana farming needed price support and protection. The bauxite and tourist industries—the businesses that extracted more than they put in—were growing but had little effect on an island where more than one in three was unemployed. Here was where the optimism of official nationalism broke down. (23)
.Political corruption and confrontation between two main parties: the Conservative Jamaican Labour Party (JLP) and the democratic socialist People’s National Party (PNP).
.U.S. intervention in Jamaica and economic retreat.
.Violence against the supporters of the opposition; The intermingling of state violence and gang violence.
Diaspora
.In 1948, the British Nationality Act gave people from colonies the right to live and work in Britain. The government needed workers to help fill post-war labor shortages and rebuild the economy. Caribbean countries were also struggling economically, and job vacancies in the UK offered an opportunity. Many of those who came became manual workers, drivers, cleaners, and nurses in the newly-established NHS.
.The 1971 Immigration Act gave Commonwealth citizens living in the UK indefinite leave to remain – the permanent right to live and work in the UK.
This included the Windrush generation and people from other former British colonies in South Asia and Africa.
Racist alarm at the increase in the Black British population led to the Commonwealth Immigrants Act that restricted the entry of immigrants from current and former British colonies. By 1972, only those with work permits, or parents or grandparents born in Britain, could enter the country, and this effectively ended most Caribbean immigration.
Here’s a diasporic take on the “British” experience:
Cultural-Spiritual Factors
.Rastafarianism (Afro-centric religion and culture; people’s nationalism: a return to the ideals of independence; emancipation)
Rastafarianism was an indigenous fusion of messianism and millenarianism, anti-colonialism, and Black nationalism, and it gave the cause of “Black supremacy” spiritual, political, and social dimensions. The religion found a fast following in the impoverished western Kingston ghettos, especially in the yard called Back-O-Wall, where Rastas constructed a camp of wood and tin. Through the mid-1960s, amidst frequent and constant run-ins with the colonial authorities, their influence over the tenement yards grew. (Chang 23-4)
.Rebel music: rocksteady, reggae, sound systems and dub
“Noise came up from the streets to fill the space—yard-centric toasts, sufferer moans, analog echoes—the sounds of people’s histories, dub histories, versions not represented in the official version. As musical competition was overshadowed by violent political competition, dub became the sound of a rapidly fragmenting nation—troubling, strange, tragic, wise slow-motion portraits of social collapse.” (Chang 30)
The soundtrack as an example of your upcoming assignment:
The film moves through a specific sequence of songs reflective of lovers rock as a genre and of those genres that influenced it and that it also incorporated.
.Benito Martínez Ocasio, aka Bad Bunny, came to fame during an (ongoing) intense socio-political-ecological collapse in the archipelago of Puerto Rico- a colonial territory since the US invaded in 1898.
.The crisis includes an economic recession, an illegal (non-audited) debt, climate disasters, an extended energy blackout, aid mismanagement and neglect, local and federal necropolitics (how social and political power are used to dictate how some people may live and how some must die), a massive shutdown of schools, the defunding of public education, the privatization and deterioration of public services, a wave of femicides and queer-phobic crimes, forced migration to the US, internal displacement due to a tourist-US investor led economies, land-grabbing and 126 years of US colonialism that denies Puerto Rico to this day the right of choice to either statehood and full citizenship or independence.
.Keeping a balance between his reggaeton/trap/pop persona (a carefree yet melancholic sexual adventurer- now burdened by fame), he has also used and shared his platform to discuss issues regarding political corruption, gender politics in music, queer and trans rights and visibility, the visitor economy, ecological deterioration, and the displacement of local communities.
. You can find the original lyrics and English translation here.
The repeated phrase “Puerto Rico ‘ta bien cabrón” discusses the importance of a Black music lineage (bomba, salsa, reggaeton), sports dominance, local knowledge/saberes, Caribbean solidarity (shout out to the Dominican Republic!), activism, political resistance to colonialism (through its images of political leaders and protests), neoliberalism, and corruption. “Cabrón” also means fucked-up, demanding, and challenging.
.The video is interrupted by a “breaking news” story by independent journalist Bianca Graulau about the power system’s vulnerability after the government privatized the company. The report gives context to understand the economic increase in utilities and how the many blackouts are taking lives and affecting the locals daily. The song then “performs” a blackout, a “maldito apagón.”
.Bad Bunny identifies an appropriation problem due to reggaeton’s popularity on a global scale. He says everyone mimics the genre and the Puerto Rican/Latino slang. For him, this cultural issue mirrors the dynamics of colonialism. He warns people, “welcome to el calentón,” you are going to burn, “cuidao con mi corillo,” beware of Puerto Ricans because we don’t stand for shit/fakeness/ political abuse.
.The party scene could be read as a sequence that plays or reproduces tourist’s expectations about the island. At the same time, it is also portraying Puerto Rican queer joy and pleasure as resistance.
.The song ends with a femme voice declaring that she doesn’t want to migrate or be displaced. They (the tourists/the US investors/ the privatizers/the fake appropriators) are the ones who must go because they are taking what belongs to me/us (as Puerto Ricans and Caribbean people).
How does the NYT article differ from Bianca Graulau’s reportage? Analyze their emphasis on the perspectives of US settlers, the political class, and the local populations affected.
How do you interpret the figure of Samuel Sánchez Tirado that opens the NYT article? How does he perform Caribbeanness/Puertoricanness under the visitor economy?
Written Reflection
Both Bad Bunny and Bianca Graulau propose that transformative change concerning gentrification and displacement will only come from the ground up, from the communities affected and their allies. Discuss how the song and the reportage communicate these ideas. What examples of activism and daily resistance do they foreground? What is the role of education and the arts in promoting grassroots actions?
Puerto Rican Voices: Season Five, Episode Two
Tito Matos: Ahora Sí (Noelia Quintero, 2022)
Following the death of Tito Matos, this biographical episode of Centro Voices looks at his legacy as a musician, cultural worker, mutual aid organizer, and agitator. Using archival footage to reflect on Tito’s contributions to Plena, we discover how he built knowledge, occupied neglected spaces, and mentored students in Puerto Rico and the diaspora.
Discussion Questions
.What is Tito Matos’ legacy to Puerto-Diaspo-Rican culture?
.How does Tito Matos’ experience with the Puerto Rican diaspora contribute to the evolution of Plena? What does his experience tell us about the expansion of Caribbean art beyond the basin?
.With what purpose did Tito Matos founded la Casa de la Plena? Do you consider la “casa” an artivism effort? How does it resist gentrification and displacement?
.How did Tito Matos nurture younger generations of “pleneres”? What role did inclusivity play in his activist pedagogy? What connections do you see with Bad Bunny’s politics of inclusion?
.In what other forms did Tito Matos perform his activism?
What type of allusion do the material (a neon sign) and the words “Caribe” and “hostil” create?
Why do you think the artist Yiyo Tirado describes the Caribbean this way?
Small Place
Jamaica Kincaid, born in 1949 in St. John’s, Antigua, is a Caribbean writer known for her poignant portrayals of family dynamics and her native Antiguan landscape. Settling in New York City at 16, she adopted her pen name for writing anonymity. Joining The New Yorker in 1976, her essays delved into Caribbean culture. Her debut, “At the Bottom of the River” (1983), blended lyricism and indignation. Autobiographical novels like “Annie John” (1984) and “Lucy” (1990) explored mother-daughter relationships amid colonial shadows. Kincaid’s rage at Antigua’s exploitation surfaced in “A Small Place” (1988). “The Autobiography of My Mother” (1996) and “My Brother” (1997) reflected on familial bonds and loss. “Among Flowers” (2005) documented her Himalayan expedition. “See Now Then” (2013) dissected marital disintegration with biting introspection.
In “A Small Place,” Jamaica Kincaid immerses readers in the discomforting role of a tourist arriving in Antigua. She paints a scene of crumbling colonial buildings through vivid imagery, confronting the disparity between tourist privilege and local struggles. Kincaid’s narrative voice challenges the moral emptiness of tourism, highlighting the obliviousness of visitors to the realities faced by residents. The juxtaposition of Antigua’s allure to tourists with its inhospitality for locals underscores the inherent contradictions of the industry. As readers are confronted with the tourist’s fleeting escape and the island’s underlying issues, Kincaid incites reflection on the complexities of privilege, exploitation, and human indifference.
Using Benítez-Rojo’s terminology, how would you describe the “tourism machine” as presented in this ad and the connections you identified with other studied machines?
.According to Kincaid, what are the tourists’ motivations for coming to Antigua, and how might this structure expectations and interactions while vacationing? (Pages 3-5; 15-16)
.How does Kincaid portray the (North American/ European/ White) tourist? (Pages 16-17)
.How does Kincaid portray Antigua and Antiguans? (Pages 7-9)
.Why does the native person hate the tourist? (Pages 18-19)
General Questions
.Why do you think she uses the second person (you)?
.What does Kincaid want her (western) reader to ultimately understand?
.Before turning to Roxane Gay, let’s consider the most iconic image for tourism, featuring Sintra Arunte-Bronte, an Indo-Trinidadian model, as the poster girl for Jamaica’s 1972 record-breaking ad campaign:
How do images and tropes of tourism in this video and the poster manifest the dynamics that both Kincaid and Gay explore?
“The Harder They Come”- Roxane Gay
Haitian descent, Roxane Gay is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is the author of Ayiti, An Untamed State, the bestselling Bad Feminist, Difficult Women, and Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She has several forthcoming books and works on television and film projects.
Written Reflection
Discuss how Roxane Gay’s story evokes the distorted versions of Haiti (and Black women’s bodies) American tourists have at their resort vacations. Explain how Hispaniola is also seen as a place of sexual exploits. What is the relevance of the term “groomed” in the second paragraph of the story? How can the concept of “performance” help us to think through these questions?
The artist Joiri Minaya wants to establish a “link between slavery, colonization, and the tourism industry,” what links can you establish between those terms/practices and the works we studied today?
Derek Walcott, metaphorical poetry captured the physical beauty of the Caribbean, the harsh legacy of colonialism, and the complexities of living and writing in two cultural worlds, bringing him a Nobel Prize in Literature.
Mr. Walcott’s expansive universe revolved around a tiny sun, the island of St. Lucia. Its opulent vegetation, blinding white beaches, and tangled multicultural heritage-inspired. [The Caribbean’s most famous literary son, [created] an ambitious body of work that seemingly embraced every poetic form, from the short lyric to the epic.
“I come from a place that likes grandeur; it likes large gestures; it is a society of physical performance; it is a society of style,” he told The Paris Review in 1985. “I grew up in a place in which if you learned poetry, you shouted it out. Boys would scream it out and perform it and do it and flourish it. If you wanted to approximate that thunder or that power of speech, it couldn’t be done by a little modest voice in which you muttered something to someone else.”
Thinking about Identity, History, Making and People-Making.
In Derek Walcott’s long poem “The Schooner Flight,” the Caribbean’s history during and after colonial rule influences how people talk and what they mean. The text is all about Shabine remembering poetically things from the past, which often mirror what Walcott himself went through. The poet uses different kinds of language, like the local way of speaking (patois or Trinidad English Creole), along with a more complex lyrical style, to show how the Caribbean’s history and culture were shaped by colonization and how it affected people.
Shabine heads out to sea when corruption ruins his profitable smuggling business between Trinidad and Venezuela. His life is tangled up in dishonesty, including his relationship with his lover, Maria Concepcion. Feeling trapped, Shabine sees the sea as his only way out. It’s not that he doesn’t care about his wife, kids, lover, or home, but love itself, daily life and respectability on the island are tricky businesses. So, Shabine sets sail, and what happens following forms the poem’s heart.
Shabine makes a simple declaration of his hybrid identity that he then complicates:
I’m just a red n—-r who loves the sea, I had a sound colonial education I have Dutch, n—-r, and English in me, and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation. (p. 2, stanza 1)
Explore how Shabine complicates his identity in this quotation. Questions to consider:
What does a “sound colonial education” suggest, and how may this trouble the assertion of the preceding line?
Look at the final two lines of the quotation: What categories of identity are there, and what’s missing?
What is congruent and what is incongruent among these categories, “Dutch, n—-r, and English”?
How does this help us to understand the final line of the quotation?
Questions for Group Work:
Groups of 3 will respond to a specific question below. Each question is drawn from the quote provided, and responding to the question involves a close textual analysis of the quotation. Be sure to consult the Oxford English Dictionary for suggestive definitions and connotations of words that stand out to you. Take 7 minutes to read closely, discuss, and write notes, then take 3 minutes to formulate a brief (5 minutes, max) discussion of your question. Be sure to incorporate your close textual analysis in your presentation.
Question 1:
Walcott brings Shabine’s identity into dialogue with the weight of two significant epochs of Caribbean history, slavery, and independence, that result in a stinging double rejection.
I had no nation now but the imagination.
After the white man, the n—–s didn’t want me
The first chain my hands and apologize, “History”;
the next said I wasn’t black enough for their pride. (p. 4, stanza 3)
Explore the double rejection that Shabine experiences in these lines. Out of this double rejection, Shabine declares that he “had no nation now but the imagination.” Look closely at the meanings of these words, their etymologies, and their connotations: What does this statement mean?
Question 2:
In a justly celebrated passage, Walcott represents the relationship between the events of a distant (and not so distant) history and one’s identity as a confrontation with one’s own ancestry:
I met History once, but he ain’t recognize me,
a parchment Creole, with warts
like an old sea bottle, crawling like a crab
through the holes of shadow cast by the net
of a grille balcony; cream linen, cream hat.
I confront him and shout, “Sir, is Shabine!
They say I’se your grandson. You remember Grandma,
your black cook, at all?” The bitch hawk and spat. (p. 4-5, Stanza 3)
Explore this confrontation with history/ancestry. What does it mean that he describes his grandfather as a “parchment Creole”? What difference does it make that he states, “They say”? How does the description of his grandmother differ from that of his grandfather? What can you infer about the relationship between Shabine’s “grandparents”? What does it mean that history hawked and spat?
Question 3:
In the Middle Passage, Shabine again confronts the doubleness of his own identity and its erasures when he encounters the famous admirals of the past, (p. 6, Stanza 5) “Rodney, Nelson, de Grasse” and then the slave ships:
Next we pass slave ships. Flags of all nations,
our fathers below deck too deep, I suppose,
to hear us shouting. So we stop shouting. Who knows
who his grandfather is, much less his name? (p. 6, stanza 5)
Explore the juxtaposition of these two encounters. How are these two groups–admirals and slaves–different; how are they connected? What does Shabine’s shouting to the slaves suggest or represent? What does it mean that the slaves are “below deck too deep” to hear Shabine and others? “
Exasperated by his unanswered ‘shouting,’ Shabine asks, “Who knows/ who his grandfather is, much less his name?” The second “his” referent is ambiguous–grammatically, to whom may it refer? What does this double referentiality suggest for one’s identity?
Question 4:
In stanza 8, Shabine narrates a fight he had with another crew member:
It had one bitch on board, like he had me mark—
that was the cook, some Vincentian arse
with a skin like a gommier tree, red peeling bark,
and wash-out blue eyes; he wouldn’t give me a ease,
like he feel he was white. Had an exercise book,
this same one here, that I was using to write
my poetry, so one day this man snatch it
from my hand, and start throwing it left and right
to the rest of the crew, bawling out, “Catch it,”
and start mincing me like I was some hen
because of the poems. Some case is for fist,
some case is for tholing pin, some is for knife—
this one was for knife. (p. 7)
What could this fight represent? Look closely at the description of Shabine’s antagonist–what do you notice about him, and what does this suggest? What is the cause of the fight? What are Shabine’s other anxieties at this moment? What does it mean later in the stanza, regarding the injury and its result, “There wasn’t much pain,/ just plenty blood, and Vincie and me best friend”?
Question 5:
In the 10th stanza, “Out of the Depths”, a crisis precipitates for Shabine who begins to descend into madness. The pathetic fallacy of the storm of the sea represents his being engulfed by the contradictory historical forces that seem to constitute him. He prays for deliverance and gains a strength that tells him of his connection to his people and the divine and the power of the divine to relieve oppression. He remembers that in hard pews, “we sang how our race / survive the sea’s maw, our history, our peril, / and now I was ready for whatever death will.”
This is followed by “After the Storm” in which Shabine states,
Though my Flight never pass the incoming tide
of this inland sea beyond the loud reefs
of the final Bahamas, I am satisfied
if my hand gave voice to one people’s grief. (p.11)
Look carefully at these lines: What has Shabine realized? What does “satisfied” mean, and what does it suggest about his journey and its conclusion? What is its conclusion? This journey was aboard the schooner called Flight. What are the meanings of “schooner” and “flight”? What are the historical and contemporary connotations and denotations of these words? What meanings do they create for the poem?
Concluding Thoughts
The Caribbean Sea is not just a body of water but a repository of history, much like individuals carrying the stories of their ancestors within them. Whether one acknowledges this role as a conduit for history matters less than it’s an inherent part of one’s identity.
In the poem, it’s understood that the sea is never empty, especially in the Caribbean, where it’s witnessed the suffering of people transported as slaves. This realization challenges the generalized idea that the sea is a part of Caribbean people’s identity, as many may actually fear it due to its association with past trauma. Running away, whether by sea or land, won’t solve the inner and historical struggles that haunt you.
Shabine’s life revolves around a longing for something elusive that he documents through poetry. Despite the mess he’s made of his life, there’s a suggestion that pursuing something beyond trafficking, domestic politics, or human affection can give life meaning beyond personal failures. However, this pursuit may also hurt those closest to you.
Writer, critic, and Latin American Studies professor, Antonio Benítez-Rojo proposes that a first reading of the Caribbean will present: its fragmentation; instability; reciprocal isolation; uprootedness; cultural heterogeneity; lack of historiography and historical continuity; contingency and impermanence; and syncretism (1).
However, he says that the time has come for postindustrial society to start rereading the Caribbean, that is, to do the kind of reading in which every text begins to reveal its own textuality (2).
Key Concepts
chaos: within the (dis)order that swarms around what we already know of as Nature, it is possible to observe dynamic states or regularities that repeat themselves globally. (2); It includes all phenomena that depend on the passage of time; Chaos looks toward everything that repeats, reproduces, grows, decays, unfolds, flows, spins, vibrates, seethes (3); [reading the Caribbean from the theory of chaos looks to find] processes, dynamics, and rhythms that show themselves within the marginal, the regional, the incoherent, the heterogeneous … the unpredictable that coexists with us in our everyday world. (3)
repetition: [within] the discourse of Chaos… every repetition is a practice that necessarily entails a difference; however, amid this irreversible change, Nature can produce a [complex, highly organized and intense] figure (3).
meta-archipelago: a meta-archipelago has the virtue of having neither a boundary nor a center. Thus the Caribbean flows outward past the limits of its own sea with a vengeance (4); the Caribbean is an important historical-economic sea and, further, a cultural meta-archipelago without center and without limits, a chaos within which there is an island that proliferates endlessly, each copy a different one, founding and refounding ethnological materials like a cloud will do with its vapor (9)
machine: whose flux, whose noise, whose presence covers the map of world history’s contingencies, through the great changes in economic discourse to the vast collisions of races and cultures that humankind has seen (5); every machine is a conjunction of machines coupled together, and each one of these interrupts the flow of the previous one; it will be said rightly that one can picture any machine alternatively in terms of flow and interruption (6).
From Columbus machine to the sugar-making machine
Consistent machinic repetitions: the encomienda of Indians and the slaveholding plantation, the servitude of the coolie and the discrimination toward the criollo, between commercial monopoly and piracy, between the runaway slave settlement and the governor’s palace (5).
Columbus rudimental machine was a bricolage: Indians and their handicrafts, nuggets of gold and samples of other minerals, native species of plants and animals, and some words like tabaco canoa, hamaca, etc. Columbus’s machine was quickly remodeled and, carried on Indians’ backs over the sierras, set into motion in a half dozen new places. (6)
By around 1565, Columbus’s small and rudimentary machine had evolved into the Grandest Machine on Earth. In the first century of Spanish colonization this machine yielded more than one-third of all the gold produced in the whole world during those years; These fabulous deliveries of precious metals were the result of various innovations, for example: guaranteeing the availability of the necessary cheap manpower in the mines through a system known as the mita; using wind energy and marine currents to speed up the flow of oceanic transportation; implanting a costly system of security and control from the River Plate estuary to the Guadalquivir. But, above all, established the system called La flota the fleet. (7)
It was a machine made up of a naval machine, a military machine, a bureaucratic machine, a commercial machine, an extractive machine, a political machine, a legal machine, a religious machine, that is, an entire huge assemblage of machines which there is no point in continuing to name. The only thing that matters here is that it was a Caribbean machine; a machine installed in the Caribbean Sea and coupled to the Atlantic and the Pacific. (7)
Questions
Describe the fleet machine as examined by Benítez Rojo? (8)
What did the plantation machine produce? (8,9)
What do you understand Benitez Rojo means by the “Caribbean machine”? (18)
Free-write reflection
supersyncretism: it rose out of the collision of European, African, and Asian components within the Plantation, this syncretism flows along working with ethnological machines that are quite distant in space and remote in time (12)
Option One
Reread Benitez-Rojo’s description of la virgen de la caridad del cobre (12-16). How does this illuminate the supersyncretism, the density, and the workings of the various machines (Columbus machine, Plantation machine, Caribbean machine) operative in the Caribbean?
Option Two
How can la virgen de la caridad del cobre help us to understand the figure of Maria Concepcion in Walcott’s “The Schooner Flight”?
