Beyond Resistance: Notes Toward a New Caribbean Cultural Studies [PDF]

Beyond Resistance: Notes Toward a New Caribbean Cultural Studies Puri, Shalini. Small Axe, Number 14 (Volume 7, Number 2), September 2003, pp. 23-38 (Article) Published by Indiana University Press

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/smx/summary/v007/7.2puri.html

Access Provided by University Of North Texas at 08/24/11 2:59PM GMT

Beyond Resistance: Notes Toward a New Caribbean Cultural Studies Shalini Puri

T

he noted anthropologist Peter Wilson, in his 1973 book Crab Antics,¹ observed in Caribbean societies a fundamental and structuring tension between “respectability” and what he called “reputation.” “Respectability” is oriented toward bourgeois valuations of the centripetal, toward standard English, home, family, hierarchy, decorum, stability, honesty, economy, delayed returns, and transcendence. In contrast, “reputation” is oriented toward the centrifugal, toward carnival, toward Creole, the street, autonomy, mobility, trickery, display, and transience.² As with any schematic opposition, the respectability/reputation dualism is not all-encompassing, yet it is useful in making visible two related and conflicting sets of cultural desires, practices, and allegiances that are elaborated to an unusual degree in the Caribbean. The schema is also particularly pertinent as a measure of the allegiances of cultural criticism, which are what I propose to study here.

1. Peter Wilson, Crab Antics: The Social Anthropology of English-Speaking Negro Societies of the Caribbean (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973). 2. Gloss taken from Richard D. E. Burton, Afro-Creole: Power, Opposition, and Play in the Caribbean (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 162. For an overview of the impact of Wilson’s study on Caribbean anthropology, see Daniel Miller, Modernity: An Ethnographic Approach: Dualism and Mass Consumption in Trinidad (Oxford: Berg, 1994), 259–64. Small Axe 14, September 2003: pp. 23–38 ISSN 0799-0537

I submit that in recent years Caribbean cultural studies has emphasized and celebrated the antisystemic values of reputation to the exclusion of respectability. This is most obvious in the disproportionate study of carnival as compared to Christmas (an small imbalance that Daniel Miller has observed). Moreover, the privileging of reputation axe in Caribbean studies is continuous with a fetishization of resistance and transgression in cultural studies more broadly.³ In both cases, the fascination with resistance and transgression derives from a legitimate critique of statism and class reductionism, and an interest in the political possibilities they neglect—whether feminism and the New Social Movements, subcultures, or styles of consumption. Paul Gilroy, for example, asserts that for the descendants of slaves, with their historical memory of forced labor, the centerpiece of hopes for emancipation cannot be labor, but rather must be artistic expression.⁴ The point is a suggestive one, and goes a long way in explaining the intense outpouring of creative energies and the concentration of artistic expertise and expressive desire in carnival. But it does shrug aside the complex contemporary cultures of work in the Caribbean and the contestations of dominant ideology that occur within the realm of respectability. And it does not engage the structuring tension between reputation and respectability, between mass performances of transgression and mass desires for acceptance and assimilation, between popular desires for work and popular celebration of respite from its exploitative conditions. Thus, noting the unpopularity of practices of reputation in the political sphere, where Caribbean publics have tended to make pragmatic and often cautious political choices rather than revolutionary ones, Richard Burton argues that “significant progress within the system will depend on some new blend of the cultures of reputation and respectability that have in the past been so strongly opposed.”⁵ Although I do not agree with the safety-valve theory of which Burton is ultimately a cautious proponent, I find his concluding arguments on the political importance of cultures of respectability a compelling corrective to our present critical disposition. Thus, I contend that we need both to dethrone carnival as the privileged site of study of Caribbean culture and to change the nature of the questions we ask about

24

3. For an elaboration of my critique of a cultural studies focused around resistance and transgression and for my development of what I call a theory of the performativity of opposition, see Shalini Puri, The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post/Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity (New York: Palgrave, 2003), chapter 4. Other critiques of the privileging of resistance and transgression have been made by critics as diverse as Lila Abu-Lughod, Aijaz Ahmad, Talal Asad, David Harris, Abdul JanMohamed, Kaplan and Kelly, Neil Lazarus, Meaghan Morris, Sherry Ortner, Benita Parry and Gayatri Spivak. 4. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 40. 5. Burton, Afro-Creole, 267.

it. In making this contention, one proviso is necessary: it is crucial to remember that carnival in the academy might serve a very different function from that which it serves in Caribbean societies. Thus, although I do not think that carnival itself can be usefully characterized as a safety valve, at the risk of sounding uncharitable, I venture that car- Shalini Puri nival studies may have functioned as such. I hope it will be clear that I am not underestimating the aesthetic, cultural, and economic importance of carnival. What concerns me is the critical divorce of carnival from other aspects of everyday life and the neglect of other oppositional possibilities: the resources of respectability through which a group of village women may mount a campaign against the drunkenness of their husbands; the informally institutionalized networks of daycare; the struggles for clean water, and so on. I venture, further, that the rhetorical emphasis on reputation as a form of resistance, with its fundamental investment in identity politics, could usefully yield to the public sphere as a site of resistance—more particularly, to what Nancy Fraser has called “subaltern counterpublics.”⁶ My reason for this speculation lies not in any desire to philosophically deconstruct identity (in the manner of Judith Butler), nor does it derive from an epistemological relativism that declares the equivalence of all identities, for there is indeed much progressive scholarly and activist work being done under the rubric of identity. Instead, my hesitations about identity derive from the suspicion that in contexts of a predominant liberal individualism such as the US academy’s, the rhetoric of identity is likely to be appropriated by individualist and subjectivist politics (and indeed may often unselfconsciously proceed from such politics). The term “public sphere,” in contrast, inescapably draws attention to interacting collectivities and institutions. I find Bruce Robbins’s arguments for the use of the term “public sphere” rather than “culture” or “identity” persuasive: Unlike “culture,” it is more obviously a site of intersections with other classes and cultures. . . . [To speak of a working-class public sphere] is to stress a site of interaction and continuing selfformation rather than a given or self-sufficient body of ideas and practices distinguishing one group from others. Public sphere invokes “identity,” but does so with more emphasis on actions and their consequences than on the nature or characteristics of the actors.⁷

“Public sphere” thus offers a vocabulary more explicitly attentive to collective politics and arenas of solidarity. At the very least the term can redirect our studies toward

6. Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Refl ections on the ‘Postsocialist’ Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997), 81. 7. Bruce Robbins, introduction to The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xvii.

25

explicitly investigating how the resistant identities we are studying might transform the public sphere.⁸ I will divide my schematic exploration of the foregoing ideas into two sections: the small first will study alternative directions for carnival studies. By way of a discussion of dub axe poetry, the second part will address the gendered implications of the focus on reputation and some political implications of the constructed absence of attention to respectability in Caribbean studies.

I. C ARNIVAL : C HANGING

THE

Q UESTIONS

The abstract and binary framing question “radical or conservative?” which has dominated carnival studies, legislation and cultural policy, and popular opinion alike, can only bring us to an impasse. I suggest that we frame our questions about carnival in terms of the often tense interplay of a given carnival’s structure, content, artistic context of performance, and historical conjuncture.⁹ Most studies tend to emphasize one or two

8. It is crucial that any conception of subcultures or subaltern counterpublics imagine “counter” not as a separate, self-contained alternative enclave, but as interacting with official and other counterpublics; I have been arguing that one crucial area of investigation is what forms those interactions take. Here again I have found Fraser’s work helpful: “[I]n stratified societies, subaltern publics have a dual character: On the one hand, they function as spaces of withdrawal and regroupment; on the other hand, they also function as bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed towards wider publics.” Fraser, Justice Interruptus, 82. 9. Illuminating examples of theorists of carnival who do this include Kevin Birth, “Bakrnal: Coup, Carnival, and Calypso in Trinidad,” Ethnology 33, no. 2 (1994): 165–78; Frank Manning, “Carnival in Antigua: An Indigenous Festival in a Tourist Economy,” Anthropos 73, no. 1–2 (1978): 191–204; Daniel Miller, Modernity: An Ethnographic Approach: Dualism and Mass Consumption in Trinidad (Oxford: Berg, 1994); Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Gordon Rohlehr, The Shape of That Hurt and Other Essays (Port of Spain, Trinidad: Longman Trinidad, 1992) and Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad (Port of Spain, Trinidad: Gordon Rohlehr, 1990); and Peter van Koningsbruggen, Trinidad Carnival: A Quest for National Identity (London: Macmillan, 1997). One of the richest explorations of carnival is not a theoretical but a literary account: Earl Lovelace’s classic Caribbean novel The Dragon Can’t Dance (Essex, England: Longman, 1979). It would be useful to attend to the interplay of forces I have addressed in scholarship on carnival as well. Robert Young contends that the wholesale appropriations of Bakhtin’s celebratory conception of the carnivalesque ignore precisely the historical conjuncture at which Bakhtin wrote—Stalinism’s darkest hour. See his “Back to Bakhtin,” Cultural Critique 3 (1985–1986): 71–92. Young reminds us that while Bakhtin’s marxism entailed glossing over certain theoretical improprieties in the interests of an immediate political intervention, subsequent theorists have upheld Bakhtin’s theory as exemplary. For Young, Bakhtin’s primary use for marxists lies more in “strategic politics than in producing the promised revival of sociological poetics” (79). Similarly, Stallybrass and White warn against contentism, pointing out that in either repressing or fetishizing the content of the domain of popular culture, “academic work clearly reveals its discursive mirroring of the subject-formation of the middle classes.” See Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 191–92.

26

of these terms.¹⁰ An approach that attends to the interplay of these different terms, however, can bring into focus rather than disperse the contradictions of carnival, allowing one to address carnival as both internally differentiated and externally differentiated. In other words, not only can performances of carnivals at different historical conjunctures Shalini Puri afford different possibilities, but different aspects of the same carnival may enact reversal, compensation, and continuation or intensification of existing relations of power. In fact, a single performance of carnival may be internally split, inextricably hybridizing the moment of consolidation and the moment of subversion of power. Thus, for example, big band masquerade, steelband, and jouvay may be differentially accessible to international commodification, corporate or state regulation, and constructions of carnival as an “ecstatic collectivity”; their primary audiences at the present moment tend to have very different class and gender compositions, and their aesthetics are quite sharply divergent. It is further possible that carnival trains the public in a politics of irony in which radical knowledge may be yoked to conservative action. Richard Burton’s phrase “the carnival complex”¹¹ is therefore useful in drawing attention to the loosely aggregated but autonomous and often conflicting practices that are usually drawn together under the umbrella term “carnival”—practices that caution against attempts to assimilate carnival to any unitary or homogeneous politics and invite us to make the interplay of divergence an object of our analysis. Even reading the word “conjuncture” so metonymically as to interpret it to refer to no more than the dates and times of year that carnivals are celebrated offers us a way of modulating some of the more grandiose questions we ask of carnival. Perhaps as much as (struggles around) the content of particular carnivals, the dates of carnival offer traces of the anxieties, antagonisms, and alliances thought to be enabled by carnival. If historically Caribbean carnivals have been concentrated around three periods of the year (the pre-Lenten period of early spring; Christmas and Boxing Day; and late summer), the most obvious reason for breaking with these traditional dates is Caribbean economic dependence on tourism, which is visible in the proliferation of specifically touristoriented carnivals and festivals such as ongoing “hotel” carnivals, Jamaica’s Reggae 10. Thus, proponents of the safety-valve position have tended to focus on carnival’s ritual structure, whereas advocates of carnival’s political radicalism (and it is this latter group that forms the majority in cultural and Caribbean studies) have tended to emphasize its often transgressive content. Both sets of arguments are conducted at too high a level of abstraction to adequately consider how specific conjunctural forces shape the politics of particular performances of carnival. (Indeed in the context of carnival, the traditional philosophical/genealogical distinction between essentialism and performativity seems to break down, since so many studies of carnival tend precisely to essentialize its performances.) 11. Burton, Afro-Creole, chapter 4.

27

Sunsplash, the US Virgin Islands’ Thanksgiving Jump-Up, and Nevis’s summer carnival, which seeks to boost an ordinarily slow tourist season and to avoid losing tourists to Trinidad’s bigger carnival. The massive Caribbean diasporas to London, New York, and small Toronto have also reinvented the calendar of carnival, the climates in question making axe a late summer carnival more attractive than a pre-Lenten one. If the “safety valve” theorists of carnival have argued that carnival’s subversive energies are immediately recontained by not just the return of the “normal” regimes of order and discipline, but their intensification during Lent, then how might this objection need to be modified in the light of the many carnivals that are now utterly delinked from any religious calendar? Similarly, although it is not known exactly when canboulay was delinked from Emancipation and linked instead to carnival, in the absence of which information one can make only tentative speculations, I want to suggest that the articulation of canboulay with pre-Lenten carnival instead of Emancipation shifts the registers of the “freedom” it celebrates—and further, that it would be useful to elaborate precisely such differences in nuance. Today, even in carnival, canboulay survives only as an occasional representation within mas’ (as in the 1997 carnival in Trinidad).¹² One is thus obliged to ask how it is transformed by this context of staging (indeed, here it is a staging of a staging of a staging, a depiction of blacks imitating whites imitating blacks). And what is the significance of the transposition of canboulay into an honorific mode of remembrance? An investigation of the shifting fortunes of canboulay would be one example of the necessary exploration not only of the emergence, decline and disappearance of particular carnival rituals, but of their metamorphoses through their articulation and disarticulation with other rituals.¹³ Similarly, in marked contrast to Havana’s pre-Lent carnival, the coincidence of the Santiago carnival in Cuba with a key battle of the Revolution (the 1953 attack on the Moncada barracks) has meant that annual celebrations of that carnival have also functioned as commemorations of the Revolution. Indeed, the Cuban government has consciously attempted to use carnival as a cultural instrument of revolutionary internationalism, sending carnival troupes to the Angola carnival¹⁴ and incorporating rep12. It has been argued that jouvay became the site where many of canboulay’s energies and forms of remembrance and celebration were channeled. See, for example, Earl Lovelace, “The Emancipation-Jouvay Tradition and the Almost Loss of Pan,” Drama Review 42, no. 3 (fall 1998): 54–60. 13. Obviously, I am not suggesting that any of the dates I have referred to guarantees a particular content to their politics. The same date may stir different memories and different futures. 14. David Birmingham, “Carnival at Luanda,” Journal of African History 29 (1988): 93–103. As Birmingham points out, in Angola, the date of carnival was shifted from pre-Lent to coincide with the anniversary of Angola’s Second War of Independence against South Africa, thereby explicitly maneuvering to seize the cultural energy

28

resentations of radical elements from various Caribbean nations into its own Santiago carnival.¹⁵ Finally, although the ubiquity of carnival as a popular metaphor for politics has been widely noted and signals its epistemological privilege in many Caribbean accounts Shalini Puri of sociopolitical organization (wherein carnival can function as both tenor and vehicle of metaphors of transformation, both the agent of the transformation and the model for an imagined alternative), much work remains to be done on the specific modes of address that carnival has employed. A brief instantiation may be helpful here. As an illustration of the tension between reform and revolution, between the agenda of the National Joint Action Committee (NJAC) and popular resistance to marxist or radical analyses or solutions, Herman Bennett recounts the following deeply suggestive anecdote: in 1970, during the Black Power/February Revolution in Trinidad, when George Weekes, the president of the Oilfield Workers’ Trade Union, in the course of explaining the NJAC manifesto to a crowd of demonstrators at Woodford Square (also known as the “People’s Parliament”) addressed them as “comrades,” the crowd shouted back, “None ah dat. . . . We are brothers and sisters.”¹⁶ But to me, the crowd’s response suggests a dilemma different from that of the tension between reform and revolution, which Bennett identifies (and which is compatible with Burton’s analysis of the pragmatic political caution of many Caribbean publics). To be sure, the crowd’s shout of “none ah dat” likely emerges from a historically based and deeply felt suspicion of all systemic formal politics, including an Opposition that has often been ineffectual or corrupt. But what I also want to suggest is that when read in conjunction with carnival mas’ bands with names like “Psychedelic Latin America” and “Brightest Africa,”¹⁷ the crowd’s resistance to Weekes’s addressing them as “comrades” is a metonym of larger differences between the modes of address of carnival and realpolitik. And this discrepancy helps explain how a public that explicitly refuses certain political forms of Black Power politics can at the same time throw itself into the impassioned creation of Black Power carnival floats. and identity of carnival to legitimate nationalist and statist agendas. How successful those maneuverings have been is, of course, another matter. 15. Judith Betteleheim, ed., Cuban Festivals: An Illustrated Anthology, Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, vol. 1444 (New York: Garland, 1993). 16. Herman Bennett, “The Challenge to the Postcolonial State: A Case Study of the February Revolution in Trinidad,” in The Modern Caribbean, ed. Franklin Knight and Colin Palmer (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 129–46. Quote from page 141. 17. Michael Anthony, Parade of Carnivals of Trinidad, 1839–1989 (Port of Spain, Trinidad: Circle Press, 1989), which provides year-by-year accounts of carnival mas’. My examples of mas’ bands are drawn from his descriptions of the carnival floats of the Black Power years.

29

To the perceived class abstraction “comrades,” the crowd preferred “brothers and sisters,” an address in terms of race and family, through which class is arguably embodied. The names of the carnival floats clearly privilege spectacular embodiment, which small takes precedence over ideological purity, abstract correctness, or realism. The band name axe Psychedelic Latin America also surfaces the potentially tense conjoining of Black Power’s anti-imperial internationalism with the ambivalent transnationalism of Trinidad’s relationship to the United States, which is captured in the allusion to a globalized American hippie culture that was already influencing Trinidad. Similarly, in the fictional calypso sung by the protagonist in Earl Lovelace’s short story “Joebell and America,” Joebell implicitly compares himself to a group of luminaries who confounded realist logic: Gandhi, Nkrumah, Hitler, Mussolini, and Uriah Butler. What these otherwise diverse figures share is an ability to “stand the pressure” and scale.¹⁸ Indeed, Joebell’s deep identification and admiration for America is based precisely on his association of America with certain values of reputation: the arguably carnivalesque values of risk, recklessness, and impetuosity, gambling against the odds, rising to the challenge, and spectacular scale. Frank Manning’s study of carnivals during the Black Power movement in Antigua is one of the few to analyze the role of spectacle in managing and reconciling ideological contradictions in the 1970s Antigua carnival in relation to Black Power ideology. He argues that on the one hand carnival contributed to the expression of an oppositional Black Power ideology by drawing on symbols of Africanness and black pride, endowing “ideological principle with sensate appeal while conversely ennobling this appeal by giving it ideological legitimacy.” On the other hand, far from insisting on any opposition between Black Power and tourism (from which carnival’s “tonal orientation toward affluence, glamour, consumption, and hedonism” were drawn), by “associating the symbols of one process with those of the other,” carnival helped reconcile the opposition between a political movement oriented toward black nationalist sovereignty and an economic movement toward increasing dependency on foreign tourism.¹⁹ What we need to study are the discrepancies and continuities between the modes of address employed by carnival and by formal state politics, and the pressure each may bring to bear upon the other.

18. Earl Lovelace, “Joebell and America,” A Brief Conversion and Other Stories (London: Heinemann, 1988), 111–24. See p. 116. 19. Manning, “Carnival in Antigua,” 199–200, 197, 202.

30

II. D U B P OETRY : S PECTACULAR TRANSGRESSION

AND

O RDINARY M ORNINGS

While I am certainly not alone in my critique of the fetishization of resistance and reputation, it seems to me that the gender implications of this fetishization have yet to receive Shalini Puri adequate scrutiny. The present critical emphasis on reputation carries a very problematic gender politics. For to the extent that respectability historically and discursively has been associated with the feminine, with mothers and wives promoting religiosity, economy, and the cultivation of domestic virtues, the current erasure or downright denigration of respectability as simply buying into dominant ideology devalues the feminine. In some senses, then, contemporary cultural theory’s celebration of reputation positions women as acquiescing to the status quo and men as resisting it. Ironically, then, an approach to resistance that initially sought alternatives to the heroic masculine subject may be reinstating it. Several excellent feminist studies have contested the discursive association of reputation with men and respectability with women, pointing out that such discourses take middle-class women as the implicit norm. Such studies adopt the strategy of demonstrating the participation of working-class women in transgressive “street culture” or in the culture of the Caribbean “yard.” Alternatively, they might point to the transgressive practices of women in carnival, from the famed and sometimes feared jamettes of carnival in nineteenth-century Trinidad, to the erotic public display in the dance form known as wining, to the chutney-soca debates; or to the transgressive “slackness” of working-class dancehall culture in Jamaica.²⁰ My concern in this essay, however, is less to demonstrate the participation of women in the reputation pole of the Caribbean dualism than to question the privileging of that pole by critics and the consequent shrinkage of the field of contestation. For if the original impulse behind studying everyday forms of resistance was to expand the field of recognized resistance to include everyday practices, the current emphasis on carnivalesque transgression again constricts it. It is a very select everyday that we now study in our untheorized preference for what I call the spectacular everyday over a quieter, less flamboyant daily reality.

20. For examples of such feminist studies, see Natasha Barnes, “Body Talk: Notes on Women and Spectacle in Contemporary Trinidad Carnival,” Small Axe 7 (March 2000): 93–105; Carolyn Cooper, Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the ‘Vulgar’ Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (London: Macmillan, 1995); Pamela Franco, “The ‘Unruly Woman’ in Nineteenth-Century Trinidad Carnival,” Small Axe 7 (March 2000): 60–76; and Patricia Saunders, “Nah Go Bow Down Low: Market Values, Cultural Values, and National Identity,” paper presented at the Conference on Caribbean Culture and Festival of the Word, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, January 9–12, 2002.

31

If we approach respectability and reputation as mutually constitutive poles, we would be able to acknowledge the many ways in which the performance of reputation depends on other performances of respectability. Indeed, the rebel’s refusal to work small for the “shitstem” may be enabled by the “respectable” labor of an unacknowledged axe person, often a woman—a lover, spouse, mother, sister, grandmother, or neighbor. Earl Lovelace’s novel The Dragon Can’t Dance, which is a deeply sensitive portrait of how reputation and respectability are not only gendered but raced, explores both the utopian edge of the culture of reputation (particularly in regard to its refusal of the ethic of ownership) and the limits of that tactic. Dragon is exceptional in that it reveals both the utopian edge of the male Afro-Caribbean lumpen-proletariat’s practice of reputation and the frequent reliance of many of those male characters on the respectable labor of women characters like Yvonne, Daphne, and the nameless old woman who gives Fisheye a yam. But the novel is more representative in that these “respectable” characters remain marginal to the novel, somehow not achieving the same representational depth, embodiment, sexuality, or physical beauty.²¹ How different is the lens in Elma Napier’s much less widely circulating story “Carnival in Martinique,” in which the female character’s marginality is not accidental, but rather is the pointed force of the story. Carnival offers scarcely an interlude in the maid Jeannette’s daily chores, and even in that interlude her desires are divided between the rewards of reputation and those of respectability. For Jeannette’s fantasy during carnival, as she gazes upon the statue of the French Empress Josephine, is not to invert dominant social values but rather to accede to dignity and status, to be included in the fold of respectability and to gain access to its promise of protection. The conclusion of the story jolts her back to the unflinching present of coerced labor: “What did Jules [her beau] matter or Josephine [Empress of France], or the spirit of carnival? She had forgotten to bring the fowls back into the yard.”²² How clipped is the horizon offered by carnival to the maid, how distant she from revelry, how flat the tones of the workday even during carnival, how set the anxiety about a man’s uncertain attentions. Even the specific forms taken by the critical valuation of Creole in the canon of Caribbean literature have been marked by the privileging of reputation. It is significant here that according to Wilson’s schema, Creole is associated with the values of reputa-

32

21. The conceptual lens of reputation is also at work in the cultural Left’s celebration of stickfighting, steelband, and jouvay, and in its concomitant lament at the less obviously transgressive “conservatism” and “uniformity” of “pretty mas’,” in which women outnumber men by a ratio of 8:1. For a persuasive critique of this position, see Miller, Modernity. 22. Elma Napier, “Carnival in Martinique,” in The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature, ed. Alison Donnell and Sarah Lawson Welsh (New York: Routledge, 1996), 230.

tion, and standard English is associated with the values of respectability. Yet as Denise deCaires Narain insightfully points out, “A gendered reading of Caribbean poetry and its relationship to Creole-usage suggests that male protest poetry is associated with a declamatory public anger,” “excess and overstatement,” whereas in the poetry of women, Shalini Puri Creole often “signals economy and understatement.”²³ What do we miss when we ignore this quieter use of Creole? A comparative study of dub poetry along gender lines holds an answer. I want to assert that the marginalization of Jean Binta Breeze within the dub poetry movement—and she is perhaps the most famous of all women dub poets—may be traced in part to the devaluation of respectability and a critical desire to uncover or recover a revolutionary or militant popular culture. Critical explorations of dub have displayed a gendered orientation toward the street and the urban riot.²⁴ Mikey Smith in Jamaica and Linton Kwesi Johnson in Britain have in many ways come to emblematize these desires, symbolizing a masculine militancy, even a conscientious incitement to riot. In no way do I wish to detract from the power, political importance, or formal brilliance of their work. Still less do I wish to delegitimize their political critiques and forms of protest, which I share in many respects. Rather, I want to point to a critical deafness in many analyses of Johnson’s and Smith’s poetry as well as in the marginalization of several equally accomplished women dub poets. For dub in the practice of Breeze, Smith, and Johnson alike explores many modulations between defiance and defeat. It is our critical practice that risks making it, literally, monotonous. Breeze herself has commented on the masculinization of the genre of dub poetry, and recalls Mutabaruka’s offer to record her poem “Aid Travels with a Bomb” in keeping with the sentiment that it was better suited for a male voice.²⁵ Moreover, she observes that the one-drop reggae beat in dub can be as constraining as iambic pentameter was to a previous generation of Caribbean poets.²⁶ It is this aspect of the beat that Breeze explores in her poem “Dubbed Out”: ²⁷

23. Denise deCaires Narain, Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry: Making Style (New York: Routledge, 2002), 86, 104. Denise deCaires Narain’s study of black British poetry is critical of the inclusion of only four women in an anthology of forty poets (106). For an insightful critique of the gender politics that informs the privileging of post-1970s Caribbean women’s writing, see Alison Donnell, “Difficult Subjects: Women’s Writing in the Caribbean Pre-1970,” paper presented at the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars Conference, Grenada, May 1998. 24. See, for example, Christian Habekost, Verbal Riddim: The Politics and Aesthetics of African-Caribbean Dub Poets (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993). His is the first book-length study dedicated to dub, and hence a landmark text. 25. Jean Binta Breeze, “Can a Dub Poet Be a Woman?” in The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature, 498–500. 26. Ibid., 498. 27. Jean Binta Breeze, Riddym Ravings and Other Poems, ed. Mervyn Morris (London: Race Today, 1988), 29.

33

i search for words

small axe

moving in their music not broken by the beat

It is this quest for a female voice and for words moving in their music that has made Breeze explore not only the steady, unrelenting beat we commonly recognize as hallmarks of dub poetry but also the formal resources offered by female backup vocalists in Bob Marley’s reggae.²⁸ It is these voices that give form to Breeze’s exploration of the political possibilities of dance or love. Moreover, she fractures the disciplining imperative of the beat through her subtle explorations of its signification and affect. Thus, in a single poem, “One Last Dub,”²⁹ she explores the sexual energy of the beat, an energy that is not reducible to the cognitive political component of the music—“dis is one time dat de / message laas / to de constant bubblin / of de riddim below / de waistline”; how that sexual release vies with religious imperatives—“ah should go to church / tomorrow . . . but / fah tinite, sweet jesas, / ah gwine let go to de pulsing beat”; how it fills the body in the absence of food; and, finally, how the beat performs a democratic leveling: “riddim nuh partial, baas, / no / riddim no partial.” In her classic poem “Riddym Ravings,”³⁰ the rant of a madwoman walking the streets of Kingston, the beat represents to the madwoman a sustaining cultural connection that the doctors are trying to sever. Breeze’s critiques of the riddym, her experiments with alternatives, therefore, should not be reduced to a simple refusal of the riddym. Rather, they represent a deliberate and insistent investigation of its many facets. 28. Breeze, in conversation at a live performance, Pittsburgh, 19 February 1998. For a characterization of Breeze’s poem “Dubbed Out” as “meta-dub,” to “suggest the transformation of the somewhat more limiting term ‘dub’ into ‘performance’ poetry,” see Carolyn Cooper, “Words Not Broken by the Beat,” in Noises in the Blood, 68, 80–81, and 85. Cooper shares Breeze’s critique of exclusive foci on the beat of dub poetry. 29. Breeze, “One Last Dub,” in On the Edge of an Island (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1997), 78–79. 30. Breeze, Riddym Ravings, 58–62.

34

In contrast, Linton Kwesi Johnson’s arresting onomatopoeic use of bs and ds— “Shock-black bubble-doun-beat bouncing”³¹—creates and amplifies a deep bass beat, evoking the unrelenting violence that is both crisis and deliverance, the beat “measuring the time for bombs and for burning,”³² “an di beat will shiff / as di culture alltah / Shalini Puri when oppression scatta.”³³ The power of Kwesi Johnson’s vision is its principled refusal of nostalgia, its sense that there is no “outside” for the Jamaican Briton, no outside to his experience of urban alienation and police brutality. But Breeze draws on a different resource, foregrounding a creative, joyful edge to blackness that is not wholly defined in relation to racist oppression. Thus, Breeze insists: “sing girl / sing / dere’s more to you / dan skin.”³⁴ Her poetic energies in some ways are directed toward an effort of the imagination to produce precisely the outside that the austerely realist aesthetic of Johnson’s poetry refuses, to reclaim a sustaining lyricism. This indeed is how Jane King sees the gift of Breeze’s poetry.³⁵ In Breeze’s work these sources of spiritual and psychological strength are also reserves that enable materialist struggles. Moreover, Breeze’s own poetic concern, like that of many women writers, is not only radical activism in the public sphere but also the dilemma of how to represent women’s labor—as she puts it, to “find a way of making doing the laundry revolutionary.”³⁶ My question, thus, is where does our critical preference for spectacular transgression leave her project and that quiet, ordinary, daily sustaining labor? How well is it able to probe the tensions between women’s desires for transgression and release and the support they find in religious, rural, or familial sensibilities, as well as in humor? Linton Kwesi Johnson’s poem “Sonny’s Lettah” is one of the instances where such sensibilities shape his poetry.³⁷ Though the content of the poem is comparable to much of Johnson’s other work—victimization by the police and the inscription of urban youth into a cycle of violence—its voice and form are significantly different, the letter to an older family member requiring a different mode of address and displaying an unusually prominent first-person narrative. This first-person narrative is, of course, a staple of much women’s poetry. And in fact, that the speaker of Breeze’s “Testament” is formed in

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

Linton Kwesi Johnson, Tings an Times: Selected Poems (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1991), 18. Ibid. “Bass Culture,” ibid., 17. Breeze, “Testament,” in The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature, 456. Jane King, “Intercity Dub, For Jean,” in The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature, 385–87. In performance, Pittsburgh, 19 February 1998. Johnson, “Sonny’s Lettah,” in Tings an Times, 25–27.

35

some of the same ways as the intended recipient of Johnson’s “Sonny’s Lettah” could be thought of as a promising moment of cross-gender conversation in dub poetry.³⁸ In the spirit of that conversation, I offer a brief intertextual reading of Mikey Smith’s small justly famous and impassioned poem “Me Cyaan Believe It”³⁹ and Breeze’s “Ordinary axe Mawning.”⁴⁰ Both poems catalogue the daily humiliation, deprivation, and exploitation of Jamaica’s poor. But the narrator of each poem occupies a markedly different speaking position. The narrator of “Me Cyaan Believe It” is a wandering male observer (a figure Christian Habekost has noted is common in dub poetry) who serves as a collective conscience/consciousness; his response to what he witnesses is the righteous rage of one who is already politically aware. Kamau Brathwaite has likened Smith’s signature cry “Lawwwwwwwwd,” which rips through the poem, to the sound of a motorbike, understanding it as “noise,” a kind of “decorative energy” that is a key feature of nationlanguage.⁴¹ In contrast, the speaker of Breeze’s poem “Ordinary Mawning,” who also speaks in the first person, cannot claim to be the collective consciousness of the yard, though she is almost certainly representative in many ways. In contrast to the energetic movement of the speaker of “Me Cyaan Believe It,” the speaker of “Ordinary Mawning” is stationary, perhaps briefly resting from the household chores, sitting on her doorstep as she looks at the laundry hanging in her yard. Her speech is characterized not by outrage but by a tonal humility, a modesty of scale, a quietness of voice (so marked that the poem has the quality of an unspoken reverie), and utter isolation. (For, as I will show, even the reader and she do not share a view of the world.) The poetic strategies of the two poems are thus notably different. The speaker of “Me Cyaan Believe It,” through his own incredulity and vivid description, rouses the reader to outrage. “Me Cyaan Believe It” urges us to recognize as literal a phrase that is usually understood to be a rhetorical overstatement. It jars us out of numbness to an awareness of an exploitation that is so widespread and so intense that it should be scandalous. The ills Smith outlines are “ordinary” in terms of the frequency of their occurrence but extraordinary in terms of the violence they perform on human bodies. The poem thus both depends on the reader’s recognition of the political and personal outrages the speaker describes and deroutinizes that recognition. On the other hand, the speaker of

38. Of course, the speaker in Breeze’s poem is an immigrant, but nonetheless, as a first-generation immigrant, who therefore has a memory of life in Jamaica, and as a mother who is a aware of a gap between her experience and that of her daughter, she shares some features of Sonny’s mother. 39. Michael Smith, “Me Cyaan Believe It,” in It a Come (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1989), 13–15. 40. Breeze, “Ordinary Mawning,” in Riddym Ravings and Other Poems, 48–49. 41. Kamau Brathwaite, “History of the Voice,” in Roots (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 301–2.

36

“Ordinary Mawning” is relatively resigned to the situation she describes; she focuses precisely on the everydayness of her trials, with no overt recrimination. The strategy of Breeze’s poem is thus one of dramatic irony, which opens up a gap between the speaker’s consciousness or knowledge and the reader’s. Indeed, the speaking woman’s conscious- Shalini Puri ness is subordinated to the reader’s (dawning) consciousness and becomes the latter’s enabling condition. The crushing isolation of the speaker is captured in the way the poem ends, not with any call to action but with one grieving, solitary word: “bawl.” Yet despite these differences there are substantial overlaps between the two poems. Indeed, the word “bawl” appears repeatedly in Smith’s poem: “me ban me belly and me bawl.” Carolyn Cooper productively notes the gendered implications of this repeated line, in which she sees the narrator’s assumption of “the persona of Woman” through an evocation of the pain of labor and childbearing.⁴² But Cooper’s reading is exceptional. In general, neither the rhyme between “bawl” and “Lawd” in Smith’s poem nor the way the two terms echo and play off each other has received much comment. The critical focus has been on the admittedly more dramatic “Lawwwwwwwwd” (indeed the motorbike to which Brathwaite compares that noise is itself often a symbol of a rebellious working-class masculinity) but not on the way the word is washed by grief, simultaneously pleading and accusing, nor on the way it breaks on the edge of despair. It is in the modulation of voice within that single word itself that the speaker traverses the distance between religious belief and religious betrayal. What I am arguing is that celebratory critical accounts of dub poetry tend to overstate the security of the political knowledge of the poem’s speaker and underread the faltering process of its emergence. Moreover, in focusing on the outrage of the poem, we ignore how that outrage is itself created through dramatic tonal contrast. We might think of the tonal contrasts evoked between “bawl” and “Lawd” as being homologous (though emphatically not analogous) to the poles of reputation and respectability. Attending to moments like those I have identified in Smith’s poem, furthermore, facilitates an understanding of other shared features of the two poems. For instance, both speakers are at breaking point; the voices of both speakers sink to a whisper at the end; and both poems culminate in a grief that is in many respects anticlimactic.

42. Cooper, Noises in the Blood, 69. See Cooper for a similar critique of the reduction of the “thematic and tonal range” of dub poetry (74) into “all protests, anger and fire, an exclusively apocalyptic idiom” (74). Her study, however, is primarily an assessment of the practice of dub poetry and a critique of its more mediocre practitioners. My study, in contrast, is more concerned with implicating literary and cultural criticism in reductive understandings of dub poetry.

37

If Jean Binta Breeze argues that the beat in dub poetry disciplines and punishes experimentation, I contend that current critical practice aggravates that tendency, reifying a living form, creating monotony from subtle and stunning performances of tonal small contrast, hearing only the steady, flat beat of anger, not its crescendos and diminuendos, axe its shifts in pace or volume. The critical strategy that makes revolutionary consciousness a precondition for gaining entry into the canon silences significant aspects of Smith’s and Johnson’s poetry, not least the long octave that spans resignation and refusal. It ignores the very processes—artistic, social, political—through which despair and defiance fold out of one another. And it leaves the speaker (poet and narrator alike) of “Ordinary Mawning” in the cold.

A CKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to Fiona Cheong and the anonymous reader for Small Axe for their suggestions on earlier versions of this essay.

38