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Article Excerpt
In "Meditation on Yellow," the introductory poem of Gardening in the Tropics, Olive Senior demonstrates the significance of voice in the staging of Afro-Caribbean rituals of revolt. Throughout the entire collection, but in that poem in particular, not only does Senior focus on women who are wily, crafty, Anancy-esque in their rebellion against hegemonic discourse, but her own poetic voice is also just as "(de)ceitful." (1) Indeed, the tonal turbulence of Senior's poems exposes her reliance on the resources of Afro-Caribbean expressive culture--"kass-kass," "drop-word," "back-chat" and the general use of a "ceitful" tongue--to enunciate her body-memory poetics of revolution. For Carolyn Cooper in Noises in the Blood, Afro-Caribbean disruptive sounds can be mobilized as verbal weaponry (136). Although Cooper's postcolonial, feminist paradigm, invested in counter-discursive subversion, continues a tradition of artistic evaluation primarily in terms of verbal reference, she importantly demands an expanded reading strategy that takes into account the "noise" or voice of oral culture (4-5). Senior herself declares, "The concept of the voice is crucial to my thinking for it is the means by which I believe we bridge the two traditions of the scribal and oral" ("Poem" 35). Using Cooper's work as a point of departure, and re-reading (Edward) Kamau Brathwaite's and Gordon Rohlehr's performance criticism in light of body-memory poetics, I argue that this extension of our critical practice to include aurality/orality is also a critical move from a reading almost exclusively preoccupied with verbal reference to one that includes verbal rhythm. I maintain that verbal rhythms, fluctuations, and pulses of Afro-Caribbean speech rituals, for example, mark Senior's work as a kind of "verbal marronage" (Cooper 136), and that this aural disruption facilitates an understanding of the ways in which cultural retention becomes a revolutionary weapon against discursive oppression. Her female personae's revolts against colonialism, patriarchy, poverty, and other damaging discourses are captured in the sounds of Senior's semiotic sedition.
Situating Olive Senior's tonal turbulence in the tradition of Afro-Caribbean ritual performance that foregrounds verbal marronage helps to provide a theoretical context for conceptualizing Senior's poetics of sound in particular, and African-diasporic trauma literature in general. In her review of Carolyn Cooper's Noises in the Blood, Barbara Lalla classifies Cooper's cultural critique as performance criticism, and this labelling highlights the impact of Afro-Caribbean performance traditions on our scribal production (see Lalla). Although Lalla's christening of such critical practice is fairly recent, Caribbean literary and cultural critics of an earlier generation, such as Kamau Brathwaite and Gordon Rohlehr, have been producing for some time what is now belatedly called "performance criticism." (2) Lalla's review suggests that performance critics explore the significant relationship in Afro-Caribbean literary production between the scribal and oral traditions, between print and performance, and, as I will argue, between verbal reference and verbal rhythm. While Caribbean scholars such as Maureen Warner-Lewis, Edward Baugh, Curwen Best, and Idara Hippolyte (3) have begun to ask crucial questions about the relationship between performance and literary studies, I would like to begin to trace the conceptual connections among damaging discourses, ritual performance, and postcolonial resistance. I am not so much invested in establishing chronology and lines of influences as I am concerned with the ideas that have coalesced into what Lalla calls performance criticism, and the value of these ideas in understanding African diasporic writing. What conceptual purchase may be derived from such terms as nation language (Brathwaite, History), voice print (Rohlehr) or verbal marronage (Cooper) when they are used in performance criticism? Moreover, since the concepts underlying all these terms seem to rest on notions of ritual repetition and re-composition, I would like to propose body-memory theory as a framework for re-reading Caribbean performance poetics.
In texts ranging from Brathwaite's History of the Voice and Rohlehr's Voice Print to Cooper's Noises in the Blood, Caribbean cultural critics have recognized the subversive tactics of Afro-Caribbean expressive rituals to help postcolonial subjects survive both discursive and physical atrocities. While by now theories of resistance have become de rigueur for both postcolonial and feminist studies, I think it is worthwhile to re-evaluate their significance (given the persistence of neo-colonial hegemonic regimes) and to refine our understanding of the role of orality/aurality in our poetics of resistance. In two talks, "The African Presence in Caribbean Literature" and History of the Voice, Brathwaite establishes a clear relationship between Afro-Caribbean performance traditions and West Indian (resistance) literature by way of what I call a performance poetics of eruption. In the first talk, Brathwaite challenges claims that "the Middle Passage destroyed the culture of [African diasporic people in the Caribbean]" by invoking notions of cultural survival and adaptation ("African" 191). For him, "African culture not only crossed the Atlantic, it crossed, survived and creatively adapted itself to its new environment" (192). In Brathwaite's 1970s, anti-colonial ideological positioning, (4) he rejects the predominantly colonial epistemology and reclaims a pre-colonial cosmology in order to construct a counter-cultural aesthetics of indigenization (204). Elaborated in History of the Voice, his nation language poetics, on which he builds his aesthetics of indigenization, advocates a radical postcolonial art form that "redefine[s] literature to include the nonscribal material of the folk/oral tradition" ("African" 204). In this redefinition, Brathwaite emphasizes the verbal soundscape of the arts--the sound symbols, tunes, tones, and rhythms--instead of the verbal reference predominant in much of Caribbean and Caribbean-Canadian criticism. (5) In delineating the characteristics of nation language in terms of orality, Brathwaite therefore insists on recognizing sound as central to an oral poetics: "The poetry, the culture itself, exists not in a dictionary but in the tradition of the spoken word. It is based as much on sound as it is on song. That is to say, the noise it makes is part of its meaning" (History 17, emph. mine).
Although Brathwaite seems at times to privilege sound over sight, I would like to emphasize his more useful point that sound is as important as sight, or, as I am proposing, that syntactic rhythm is as important as semantic reference in Afro-Caribbean poetry. Brathwaite's emphasis on the "tonal shape of the language, its rhythm changes, structure, [...] eruption into song" helps to point to the value of understanding Caribbean poetry in light of a body-memory poetics of disruption and performance ("African" 219). These ritual forms, such as mother-tongue languages that...
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