Art and Ritual in the Black Diaspora by Griffith Paul;

Author:Griffith, Paul; [Griffith, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Trickster Art

The recognition of a phenomenological relationship between inner and outer planes of reality is an important motif in diaspora trickster narratives. Walcott’s Ti-Jean and His Brothers resonates this insight, his hero, like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, dramatically reenacts the madness he must confront as a way of tackling existential nausea. It is this tactical use of madness as a corrective of social absurdity that Campbell describes as a form of psychic defense (Seeded 104). “The cure proposed by the Greeks for such confusion,” he says, “was, in Nietzsche’s view the sorcery of art, by which the paralyzing experiences either of absurdity or of horror became converted into thoughts with which one can live: in the comic, a discharge through art of the nausea of absurdity; in the sublime, an overcoming through art of the spell of horror” (104). While the madmen that Foucault describes are threats, consigned to social death, D. S. Izevbaye declares the mad person in Africa an ambiguous figure (116). Mad persons and fools have mostly occupied ambivalent sites, universally. Shakespeare’s fools, like the Yoruba counterparts that Izevbaye describes, are mystifying types who articulate forms of wisdom or probe beneath false facades to bring profound truths to the light.

These characters champion creative strategies perceived as the innate resources of word and music to free themselves from the nightmare of outer social dread and ultimately inward panic. They occupy worlds that are harassed by innumerable fears—the penalties of non-belonging physical and spiritual forms of death. For these beleaguered souls, liberation comes through soul-flight. Richmond’s “puttin’ on ole massa” act in Sobel’s narrative illustrates this transformational influence of the imagination. In an act of mimicry or cunning assimilation Richmond appropriates and parodies the folly or madness that the slave system normalizes. The absurdity that he stages disarms Smyth and, at least temporarily, suspends the disorder. Like Ti-Jean, Richmond exploits and mocks the perversity inherent in slavery; but even as Smyth laughs at his slave’s antics, he is unaware that Richmond is holding up a mirror to the abnormality that is slavery, which masters embellish as a wholesome enterprise.

Ti-Jean, too, indicts slavery as a perversity, codified by human sacrifice—the black bodies consumed by the insatiable capitalist God (a composite of devil and planter. The slave master is the cannibalizing demon against whom Ti-Jean pits himself as David battling the arch-antagonist Goliath and steels himself with a hallowed purpose, as his song says, to “bring down.” He accepts his duty in a topsy-turvy world where psychosis is entrenched in law and carries, not only the spurious logic of reason but also the moral sponsorship of a belief system. Both Richmond and Ti-Jean are iconoclasts who discredit the defective protocol.

Language is the resource of these tricksters, medium of, in Ian Adam’s and Helen Tiffin’s words, colonized persons’ “retrieval of difference.” These “potentially decolonizing strategies” function to “invest (or reinvest) devalued ‘peripheries’ with meaning” (x). The inversion rite, as an act of moral and spiritual relocation, reappraises the relative merits of the master-slave oppositional groups.

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