Before The Arrivants becomes a dim memory, supplanted by the next text on our docket, here’s a post-mortem. You’re free to just hit the “back” button, of course, but since we took a very rushed short-cut to the finish-line of Islands, you may want to read on, if only for purposes of closure. I should start by encouraging you to read The Arrivants discussion forum, which contains some fine work, even if Yours Truly only allowed occasional snippets of it to emerge in class. But in the, uh, "wake" of all this, I thought it might be useful to complement our inevitably fragmented analysis by pulling back and looking once more at the big picture, the grand sweep of things.

(I’ll warn you: once I got started, I got a little carried away here. But bear with me: I hope you’ll find this worth reading through to the end. Much of it is a recap of what we did together in class; some of it is new.)

We talked a bit about the names of the books of the trilogy. One way of reading Volume 1’s title is as a kind of complaint about the “Rights” that never really seem to have been awarded New World blacks for having completed the “Passage” out of Africa, through slavery and colonialism, and into Western modernity. The poems we worked on in class were fairly representative of the book as a whole, I think: it’s largely a demoralized, sometimes cynical, lament on harbor / -less, root / -less wandering; and near the end of the volume, the speaker (who assumes a number of different personae throughout the trilogy, but whom I’ll refer to conveniently as “the poet”) is left wondering, “Where then is the nigger’s / home?”

“Masks,” as I suggested, is a diffident attempt to answer that question by travelling back across the Middle Passage and re-learning the mythic past from which “All [Tom’s] Chillun” have been cut off—or from which they've cut themselves off. Yet what the poet finds waiting for him there in Africa is not exactly a homecoming or a triumphant rediscovery of “Roots!,” but rather a bewildering history that is simultaneously awesome and tainted, and whose path seems, in retrospect, almost predestined to terminate in terrible, self-destructive tragedy. It’s a past that an orphaned “stranger” who has been unalterably alienated “after three hundred years” (124) can’t precisely “reclaim,” but (as Kayt pointed out) can only “borrow” (148). (You Can’t Go Home Again, as the old saying has it.) But by wearing those borrowed clothes, by ritually putting on those ancestral masks and temporarily assuming their identity, he’s nevertheless begun to figure out how to “incarnate” the power that comes with them—i.e., how to “eat the gods” (116), ingest/digest those divine forces, and shit them out as something new. (He’s also gotten a glimpse of how to keep that “new shit” from falling into terminal decay by “dancing” it across limbo and onto a new plane of being: “Adowa” (117) is both a funeral dance and a dance of possession, a dance to usher the departed into the next world and to “ground” the dancer in the way Brathwaite speaks of on p. 271.) So by the end of "Masks," with the aid of kyerema, God’s mouthpiece-and-drummer, the poet has humbly begun to achieve a dim awakening. God is “dumb / dumb / dumb” (185) until the drum speaks, and at close of the book, the poet’s embryonic tongue is beginning—maybe—to uncurl. So we're set for the trajectory of the trilogy's final volume, “Islands,” to be a “waking” journey from muteness into speech/song/shout, a slow, stutter-step recovery of the creative power of the Word.

But upon returning to the “Islands,” the poet finds that things are still in a nebulous, transitional state—still “in limbo,” which is not only, theologically speaking, a fuzzy frontier (or a shore, a “Littoral,” 170) between one world and the next, one state of being or consciousness and the next, the life the New World has apparently lost and the rebirth (or the afterlife) it has yet to find; it’s also an Afro-Caribbean slave dance that has become a hackneyed nightclub act for tourists—a “fakeway” rather than a folkway. But like Tom’s “hat in hand,” the coon-show smile with which the limbo dance is sometimes performed hides a deeper hurt: the limbo deliberately recalls, like the Baldwin quote on 160, the survival of a recurring ordeal. With each successful passage in the limbo dance, the bar is set still lower and the body becomes even more cramped and contorted, just as in the stifling confines of the slave ships that brought Afro-Caribbeans to the Americas. (See “Caliban,” 194.)

So the limbo ritually rehearses an awful sort of “survival” from Africa, one that lands you here on the other side, but contorted, crippled. And that, I think, is what Brathwaite is holding up for us as a basic condition of New World experience. It’s in that same guise that we see another couple of survivals from Africa: the Yoruba trickster/creator Ananse (or Anancy, the spider) and the Dahomean trickster/god of new beginnings Elegba (the monkey), who appear as the blind fisherman spinning his net (170) and as the lame veteran leaning on his crutch (174), respectively. (“The streets of my home have their own gods,” says the poet, 189; “they can walk up out of the sea / into our houses.”). But here in the new world, having passed under the metaphorical limbo-stick, both Ananse are Elegba are debased, diminished, fallen gods: Anancy is a cunning survivor who once had creative powers but who was burnt and blackened in a fire, and Legba has been similarly maimed or disabled—he’s a burnt-out Makak rather than a nimble monkey-god.

Still, we know what eventually rises out of the ashes. And no what condition he's in, Legba is still the necessary starting-point for this resurrection: like kyerema, he’s an intercessor, a mediator between gods & humans, and also (fittingly) the guardian of the crossroads, a figure who shepherds us slowly, circuitously towards a vision of creative possibility. It’ll take time before Legba can be fully invoked in his restored capacity as a god of new beginnings, much less before Ananse can be invoked in her capacity as creator (in “Vèvè,” 263-6). But first, Legba must nevertheless be encountered, confronted, as history’s cripple. Even in the “Epilogue” (81) to Rights of Passage, the poet foresaw this: before a new world could be named, before a green world could rise from the ashes, before the carcass could “rise / rise / rise / in the butter- / flies of a new / and another / morning” (81-2), Tom’s children would, like Ananse, have to pass through the purging fire of the apocalypse, the holocaust, the volcanic “brugg-a-lung-go” (66 & elsewhere) of “The Dust.” (After all: “There is no / turning back,” 85.) Then, with luck, they might come out the other side, well-tempered, like iron that hqs passed through the blacksmith’s furnace. That’s the promise of eventual redemption that we glimpse in another old spiritual that James Baldwin quoted in the title of another one of his books (I mentioned this once in class): “God gave Noah the rainbow sign: / No more water, the fire next time.”

So like Caliban, the poet will take a “hot / slow / step / on the burning ground” (195) (or perhaps the scorched earth, the “cracked” ground, on which he’s been poured out (187), in a kind of new world libation)--out of limbo and through Legba’s open gate to a new day (“jou’vert,” pronounced zhoo-vay, from the French “jour ouvert” [“opened day,” daybreak]: the predawn wake-up celebration that marks the start of West Indian Carnival), where the holy spirit will breathe life into him with a tongue of flame. And at that point, the poet will possess that fire--a force that was previously the instrument of his ancestors' devastation. He’ll channel it, direct it, control it, like the rebellious slaves setting fire to the canefields with burning torches--a historical act that is ritually commemorated in another carnival ritual called “Canboulay” (from the French “cannes brulées,” “burnt cane”). He’ll be possessed by, electrified by--that is, he will both conduct and “ground”--the voice of the new gods. Will they still speak via the talking drum, as they did in Africa? Nope: the gods have now been translated, after all--borne across the "White River"--and so the drum has been transfigured into a new drum: the steel drum, forged, after the repeated suppression by slaveholders and colonial authorities of earlier forms of Afro-Caribbean drumming, out of the detritus of industrial society (namely, cast-off oil barrels). (And any of you who have seen the tracing on the face of the steel drum, otherwise known as the “pan,” know that it looks remarkably like Anancy’s spider-web.) Talk about “twist[ing] music out of hunger” (41): take that, V. S. Naipaul!

In Braithwaite's wake, other kinds of “music” got wrung out of equally “hungry” circumstances by dub poets in Jamaica and Britain in the 1970s and early 80s, but you'll have to explore that music on your own. (The dub poetry anthology has the same username & password as the online Course Reader, but it also has plenty o' sound files.) But pan was originally part of a trinity of carnival arts, along with masquerading and calypso. You'll learn more about both of those things before the semester is done.