Narratives of Obeah in West Indian Literature

Moving through the Margins

Janelle Rodriques

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138585812
• eBook ISBN: 9780429998652
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book explores representations of Obeah – a name used in the English/Creole-speaking Caribbean to describe various African-derived, syncretic Caribbean religious practices – across a range of prose fictions published in the twentieth century by West Indian authors.

In the Caribbean and its diasporas, Obeah often manifests in the casting of spells, the administration of baths and potions of various oils, herbs, roots and powders, and sometimes spirit possession, for the purposes of protection, revenge, health and well-being. In most Caribbean territories, the practice – and practices that may resemble it – remains illegal. Narratives of Obeah in West Indian Literature analyses fiction that employs Obeah as a marker of the Black 'folk' aesthetics that are now constitutive of West Indian literary and cultural production, either in resistance to colonial ideology or in service of the same. These texts foreground Obeah as a social and cultural logic both integral to and troublesome within the creation of such a thing as 'West Indian' literature and culture, at once a product of and a foil to Caribbean plantation societies. This book explores the presentation of Obeah as an 'unruly' narrative subject, one that not only subverts but signifies a lasting 'Afro-folk' sensibility within colonial and 'postcolonial' writing of the West Indies.

Narratives of Obeah in West Indian Literature will be of interest to scholars and students of Caribbean Literature, Diaspora Studies, and African and Caribbean religious studies; it will also contribute to dialogues of spirituality in the wider Black Atlantic.

1 ‘Too much row an’ contention is in this yard’

Contemplating cacophony in Minty Alley and Black Fauns¹

When Alfred Mendes founded Trinidad magazine in 1929, in his own words, he and C. L. R. James, his friend and fellow writer, ‘pulled no punches in calling spades “spades.”’² These authors, who with a few others would come to be known as ‘The Beacon Group,’ did not shy away from what was considered ‘scandalous’ and ‘low-brow’ by their own middle-class readership; it is natural, therefore, that the first issue of Trinidad featured a story that frankly discussed both sex and Obeah, in Creole, in poor, urban Port of Spain.³ James’ short story ‘Triumph’ (published alongside seven other short stories and six poems) drew significant indignation from the mainstream press and public for its supposed ‘obscenity.’ In it, Mamitz, a poor Black woman living in a barrack-yard, finds herself in financial trouble after having fallen out with her keeper/lover.⁴ She takes a ritual bath (engages in an Obeah act) at the advice of a neighbour and eventually finds favour with her lover again (implying that Obeah ‘works’); she thus ‘triumphs’ over another neighbour, who is suspected of having set a ‘black spirit’ on her – of having engaged in an ultimately unsuccessful Obeah act of her own.⁵ Mamitz is rewarded for her Obeah – and her neighbour is punished for hers – because Obeah can both kill and cure; ‘Triumph’ highlights not only the ambiguity of this practice but also its omnipresence, with no attempt to dissect Obeah’s origins. Leah Reade Rosenberg referred to ‘Triumph’ as a ‘blueprint for yard fiction,’ and it is indeed archetypal in its then-novel focus on the cheap, overcrowded housing of what James called the ‘porters, the prostitutes, cartermen, washerwomen, and domestic servants of Trinidad and Tobago’s capital city.’⁶ It is not incidental that this blueprint centres on an Obeah act; as we will see with the novels that follow ‘Triumph,’ Obeah was central not only to yard life but to the social realism that became the defining mode of narrative representation of ‘real’ West Indian life.⁷

The editorials in defence of ‘Triumph’ have formed somewhat of a manifesto for the foundation – decolonisation – of a West Indian literary tradition. In the subsequent issue of Trinidad, Mendes denounced what he called ‘Victorianism,’ a ‘degenerate form’ of Puritanism that ‘insisted that maidens should be prim and proper […] that philosophies should deny the reality of evil, that children should be spoon-fed with a thick soup of lies.’⁸ Mendes argued that the current ‘Zeit Geist is one of revolt against established customs and organic loyalties,’ that it was ‘futile and puerile to ask the writer of fiction to leave bodies and barrack-yards alone because they are obscene in the popular sense.’⁹ Idealisation of the past – indeed the present – for Mendes led to the ‘smug complacency of the idle rich,’ but even in his challenge to middle-class notions of ‘decency,’ he insisted that ‘epater le bourgeois is not a desire of ours’ – he was not yet ready to allow for unadulterated folk expression, not yet committed to outright revolt.¹⁰ Similarly, Albert Gomes, who would become the editor of The Beacon (the magazine that succeeded Trinidad), insisted over three years later (in reference to the same ‘Triumph’ controversy) that it was important for West Indian writers to ‘break away as far as possible from the English tradition […] we lack the necessary artistic individuality and sensibility in order to see how incongruous that tradition is with the West Indian scene and spirit.’ His criticism, too, stopped short of true radicalism, particularly in his pause to reflect that ‘a love for the fine word or sentence is nothing to be ashamed of, but the fact remains that the sooner we throw off the veneer of culture that our colonisation has brought us the better for our artistic aims.’¹¹ These remarks reveal an ambivalence towards the folk that permeates throughout West Indian writing, the struggle to create an indigenous literature out of a language and culture that is at once familiar and foreign, to speak a language you have been taught to despise.

Nevertheless, the Beacon Group has become known as the ‘foundational generation’ of West Indian writing, despite their fiction and criticism participating in a tradition both older and broader than their particular body of work.¹² Norval Edwards writes that Mendes et al. ‘foreground[ed] the central issues at stake in defining the conceptual and instrumental parameters of criticism […] questions of the folk, creolisation, vernacular culture and language, place and history.’ The barrack-yard, Edwards continues – which is the term used to describe cheap urban housing in Trinidad and Tobago – is ‘a nativist paradigm that becomes a repository of folk authenticity,’ in which is imbricated nationalism, pan-Africanism, Marxism, and labour and constitutional reform. ‘It is within the context,’ Edwards argues, ‘that the fictive paradigm of the yard functions as an embryonic imagining of nationhood that authorises the cultural nationalist template of Caribbean culture.’¹³ These writers may not have achieved a total break from the English tradition, but they did establish a new, anticolonial authenticity paradigm under which authors continue to operate. Mendes recalled in 1972 that

James and I departed from the convention in the selection of our material, in the choice of a strange way of life, in the use of a new dialect. And these departures are still with our Caribbean successors. We created the pattern that is still in use. And these are the postulates that brought West Indian novelists into being.¹⁴

This was a local literature that would express a culture that ran both parallel and counter to dominant colonial discourses of ‘respectability’ and ‘propriety’ in its focus on the West Indies’ most disenfranchised citizens. Ramchand called it the kind of fiction in which ‘we can see the decisive establishment of social realism in the West Indian novel,’ and, as such, it is significant that the first issue of Mendes’ magazine featured a short story with an Obeah act as its central plot device.¹⁵

Obeah, therefore, has been integral to yard fiction, to a broader West Indian literary tradition and to the cultural nationalist aesthetic that this literature sought to foster. The two most famous novels to come out of this period – James’ Minty Alley (1936) and Mendes’ Black Fauns (1935) – represent experimentation with the barrack-yard blueprint in the longer form of the novel, and I will be reading them against each other in this chapter to compare how they foreground Obeah in their seminal treatments of yard life. These novels present an aesthetic which, in Mendes’ words, was predicated on ‘dialect, way of life, racial types, barrack-yards, West Indian character and poverty,’ which have become fundamental to West Indian social realist writing; this is also an aesthetics of ambivalence, however, one which Obeah uniquely betrays because of the inability of these narratives to see Obeah in plain terms, to embrace it totally.¹⁶ I argue that Obeah functions in these novels as the chief agent of what Mikhail Bakhtin called heteroglossia and what yard matriarch Ma Christine calls row an’ contention (Black Fauns, p. 194).¹⁷ I will demonstrate how, while Obeah may be the cause of most uproar in these narratives, it is also, paradoxically, narrated as absence, or as partial presence. Its inclusion is necessary for dialogue but also frustrates communication, not least because its narrators cannot explain it; thus, Obeah frustrates the supposed union of the yard and the national community it may be supposed to represent.

Minty Alley is James’ only novel, completed in Port of Spain but published in London eight years after James had emigrated to England. Black Fauns is Mendes’ second and final novel, written in New York and published in London.¹⁸ Minty Alley tells the story of Haynes, a young, middle-class Black man forced into yard life (at No. 2 Minty Alley) by the death of his mother and subsequent financial hardship. The novel ends with his eventual flight from the yard and return to the middle class. Black Fauns narrates a few weeks in the lives of several washerwomen in an unnamed yard in Port of Spain, which begin with sexual/romantic intrigue and end with tragedy. Both novels are prime examples of social realist fiction in that they feature omniscient narrators and use the closed structure of the yard to organise their plots. They are further distinguishable by their attention to detail and use of Creole. Obeah and sex, scandalous taboos in colonial Trinidad, are virtually inseparable in these narratives; Minty Alley and Black Fauns count firmly as ‘anti-establishment’ fiction, and their multiple perspectives are crucial to their portrayals of West Indian cultural identity as far from uniform and inherently chaotic. Yet, even as Obeah’s inherent sensationalism may highlight the fractiousness of Trinidadian and West Indian identity and ‘[bring] to the doors of people who otherwise would have known little or nothing’ the ‘truth’ that ‘our social organisation is not what it ought to be: it is diseased’ – indeed because of this – the novels’ ultimate condemnation of these working-class people, their beliefs and their practices, denies Obeah’s potential as a means of social and political change.¹⁹ Most saliently, it limits these characters’ agency in fashioning their own futures.

All of these characters have some kind of relationship to Obeah (even if they do not believe in it), and Obeah is what they disagree upon most fiercely. It appears at (perhaps causes) moments of impasse, during which communication breaks down and narrative cohesion is tested, bringing the yard together as much as it may threaten to tear it apart. While Obeah is integral to these characters’ understandings of themselves and/in their society, it is the most ‘troublesome’ or ‘tricky’ element of this culture for these middle-class narrators to accept and is therefore pushed to the margins of its texts. James and Mendes may have prided themselves on exposing the hypocrisy of their society’s respectability politics, but their own narratives struggle to clearly and ‘realistically’ narrate Obeah. It is practised largely off the page, and the problems these texts suggest Obeah creates are not solved – nor are these characters provided with viable or progressive futures, except perhaps through emigration from the West Indies altogether.²⁰ I assert, therefore, that James’ and Mendes’ narratives do not resolve Obeah’s heteroglossia; perhaps they do not need to, or cannot. Obeah-as-literary-trope challenges their (and our) notions of narrative cohesion and destabilises the premise of verisimilitude on which social realism is founded, that of unity, upon which cultural nationalism would later define itself. By decentring any one ideological perspective it defies any one interpretation, and thus undermines narrative authority even as this authority is established.

Scholarship on the Beacon Group is plentiful, from Reinhard Sander’s pioneering work in cataloguing and critiquing this early fiction (and its accompanying anticolonial ideology), to Alison Donnell and Sarah Lawson Welsh’s consideration of the Beacon writers’ places at the forefront of West Indian writing, to Rosenberg’s critique of the group’s nationalist ideology.²¹ Scholarship on these novels, however, especially Black Fauns, is comparatively sparse. Mendes’ novel is the subject of one chapter of a scholarly monograph on the literary geography of western Trinidad, one scholarly article, a chapter of an unpublished thesis and three review articles, two of which were written some considerable time after the novel was first published.²² Minty Alley is largely included as part of considerations of James’ greater opus. It is also cited as part of wider conceptual studies, such as Rashmi Varma’s consideration of the postcolonial city, Leota Lawrence’s consideration of the presence of women in West Indian literature, Nicole King’s study of James vis-à-vis creolisation, and Mary Lou Emery’s study of modernism and the visual in Caribbean literature.²³ Both novels feature in wider discussions about Beacon fiction more generally, although focus in these studies is largely on the short stories. What is most pertinent for our purposes, howeve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Obeah as cultural signifier
• 1 ‘Too much row an’ contention is in this yard:’ contemplating cacophony in Minty Alley and Black Fauns
• 2 ‘Part of the narrative of modern art yet not central enough to be considered constitutive:’ ‘Primitive Modern’ in Banana Bottom and Wide Sargasso Sea
• 3 ‘It is the reader who constructs a story:’ Obeah and cultural identity in the mid-century West Indian short story
• 4 Obeahmen as heroes, in ‘a zone of direct contact with developing reality’
• 5 ‘The peace of those she must touch and who must touch her:’ Obeah as healing in Erna Brodber’s Myal
• Conclusion: Hearing Obeah
• Index