Architecture and Empire in Jamaica by Nelson Louis P
Author:Nelson, Louis P.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2016-07-14T16:00:00+00:00
FIG. 6.27 Isaac Mendes Belisario, “Actor Boy” from Sketches of Character: In Illustration of the Habits, Occupation, and Costume of the Negro Population, in the Island of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica: Published by the artist, 1837). Yale Center for British Art.
FIG. 6.28 Isaac Mendes Belisario, “Jaw-Bone, or House John-Canoe” from Sketches of Character: In Illustration of the Habits, Occupation, and Costume of the Negro Population, in the Island of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica: Published by the artist, 1837). Yale Center for British Art.
While the range of representation could be quite wide, these remarkable objects were marked by some commonalities. In particular, they were always manufactured specifically and annually for each festival. Scholars of the festival have tied the manufacture of the house to a religious ritual of West African origin that was devised to appease the spirits of the ancestors. The design and construction of the house is managed under spiritual consultation with the ancestors, accompanied by drink and food offerings. In some of the earliest ethnographic evidence on the festival, the jonkonnu is presented to the community on Christmas Day in the local cemetery, where the house represents the gathered community, living and deceased.122 While this might well be the case, I’d like to make two simple observations that suggest an additional interpretation: (1) the figure wears a building that more closely approximates the architecture of the master rather than the architecture of the slave; and (2) the entire weight of the house rests on his head. He literally supports the house. In this way, the house might also be seen to represent the houses of elite whites. Or by extension, the house might be a surrogate for the houses, or even the bodies, of white elites.123
This alternative or additional reading of the jonkonnu house is made all the more significant when we consider the final act of the festival—at least in its late twentieth-century manifestations—once the jonkonnu is returned to the cemetery in early January. In more recent iterations, festival-goers reach a climax in their dance and suddenly the house is violently destroyed. Through a traditional West African lens, the house represents the gathering of the ancestors and its destruction, the appeasement of ancestral spirits for another year.124 But if in Jamaica the jonkonnu house is or was a surrogate for white authority over black lives, the violence has a clear and subversive meaning.125 The palpable anger and frustration that results from a long legacy of racial oppression finds temporary release. Physical violence to a symbolic surrogate, even to a festival headpiece, became an ultimate act of resistance.
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