B L A C K S P A C E AND RITUAL FABULATION ERNA BRODBER AND THE AFTERLIFE OF LIVITY

“Well, the work that I’ve tried to do is to make people aware of the history of kinship. And to make aware that their history is the history of the one beside them, and the one around them and so on, in the hopes that people will see each other as blood relations to be loved rather than disregarded or despised.”          —Erna Brodber

“For me, narrating counter-histories of slavery has always been inseparable from writing a history of present, by which I mean the incomplete project of freedom, and the precarious life of the ex-slave, a condition defined by the vulnerability to premature death and to gratuitous acts of violence.”        —Saidiya Hartman

The Archival Black Absence

Erna Brodber, born in 1940, notes in an interview that her father was “reduced to tears when he thought about the fact that people like him, Black people, had no written history”. He was referring to a non-generic history, one that addressed their lives, circumstances, and emotions as African Jamaicans specifically.1 Erna Brodber’s work can be seen as a response to this vacuum.

She was trained at the University of the West Indies (UWI), earning a BA in History in 1963, and eventually an MSc in Sociology and a PhD in History. She describes her post-graduate life as a “ghost-like wandering through the disciplines—sociology, social psychology, anthropology, psychiatry, social work…in search of a methodology by which information about and action with or on behalf of black people could proceed at the same time” (165).2 The body of work she produced includes over twenty-four articles, six single-authored historical texts, five novels and one collection of short stories.

Reflecting on her own education, Brodber states that of the “more than twenty papers” she read for Honours in History at UWI London, only one dealt with the Caribbean. Her specific focus, which, she states, “they tried to dissuade me from choosing, was—mercifully—the Reconstruction period in the southern United States” (164).3 Thus Brodber intentionally trained herself. Her scholarly research, her fiction as well as her community-related projects were all a counter to the void in both the archives and the educational system, a void about who “we” the descendants of enslaved Africans are and have been.

Across the water, twenty years later, Saidiya Hartman, trained in literature with a BA from Wesleyan and a PhD from Yale, wrote three of the more significant texts in 21^st century African American literary theory. She, too, studied US Reconstruction, exposing it as a period that counteracted the liberty of the formerly enslaved. What resulted instead was a “burdened individuality, one that highlighted the blameworthiness of the freed (Black) individual within the context of the larger society”.4

Hartman’s work demonstrated how “discourses of rights” were implicated in and “facilitated relations of domination and new forms of bondage”, as opposed to creating subjects who were equal citizens in a free new world. Her work privileges inversions,

re-reading the dominant society’s universalising discourses, as well as those ascribed to the Black body and exposing the extent to which a national rhetoric of good will was at odds with the “gratuitous acts of violence” and the “premature death” that actually characterised the life of the formerly enslaved.

What interests us here is Hartman’s short 2008 essay, “Venus in Two Acts”, in which she puts forth the concept of “critical fabulation”, which she describes as the process of “straining against the limits of the archive to write a cultural history of the captive, [while] enacting the impossibility of re-presenting [these] lives through the process of narration” (11).5 Critical fabulation, for Hartman, is an attempt to conjure beyond what the archive presents while accepting the impossibility of imagining more than the official record allows. She states, “By playing with and rearranging the basic elements of the story, by re-presenting the sequence of events in divergent stories and from contested points of view, I…attempt to jeopardise the status of the event…and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done.”

Venus, the title character, is “a dead girl” fleetingly referred to in the records about a slave ship captain’s murder of two black girls. Nothing is known about Venus, and that is Hartman’s point. Venus (a name frequently used to describe Black women in slave plantation records) is similar to thousands of Black girls fleetingly described and found in archival references to places like “the barracoon, the hollow of the slave ship, the pest-house, the brothel, the cage, the surgeon’s laboratory, the prison, the cane-field, the kitchen [or] the master’s bedroom”. These narratives are never about the black girl or woman, but rather they are “about the violence, excess, mendacity, and reason that seized hold of their lives, [and] transformed them into commodities and corpses, and identified them with names tossed-off as insults and crass jokes”.

Hartman keeps returning to a basic question: “How does one recuperate lives entangled with and impossible to differentiate from the terrible utterances that condemned them to death…that identified them as units of value…that claimed them as property, that stripped them of human features? How does one rewrite the chronicle of a death foretold and anticipated, as a collective biography of dead subjects, as a counter-history of the human, as the practice of freedom?” I maintain that Erna Brodber’s body of work has in many ways anticipated Hartman’s questions and mounted a valiant attempt at a kind of response.

The Literary Turn

Brodber’s fiction has been interpreted through a wide variety of lenses. Carolyn Cooper, in the 1990s, addressed the Afro-Jamaican folk elements in Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home.6 In the same era, Daryl Cumber Dance makes comparisons between this same text and African American writer Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters.7 Dance’s essay was published in the same year and shares overlapping titular references with Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido’s groundbreaking anthology on Caribbean women’s criticism, Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature. The “kumbla” reference, taken from Brodber’s first novel, “signifies movement from confinement to visibility allow(ing) for a multiplicity of moves no longer contained and protect- ed”.8 Simone Drake explores migration and gendered dynamics in Brodber’s Lousiana,9 while Suzanna Engman compares the text to Wilson Harris’ Jonestown.10 Other scholars, such as Maria Cristina Fumagalli, situate Brodber’s work within a modernist context and compares it to the writings of Lady Mary Wroth.11

Curdella Forbes in her analysis of Erna Brodber’s novel Louisiana argues that there is a pioneering of a “non-nationalist worldview” here, one in which the “hegemony of the spirit”, a term used in the novel to describe spirit possession, is the primary vehicle by which a “higher than human power” directs the course of both the living and the dead. Forbes further argues that the novel’s main character develops powers akin to “an Old Testament prophet or West African spirit medium” and, in so doing, Brodber “recreates religious experience as the organizing dynamic of liberation [in the novel]…making this experience the heart of its epistemology”.12

In a more secular but compatible reading, Jenny Sharpe first refers to essays by both June Roberts and Angeletta Gourdine13 as evidence of analyses of Louisiana that see Brodber as instructing us to “listen carefully to the past for an agency that exists in the silent spaces of history”. Sharpe, however, suggests that “the novel’s depiction of spirit possession [be read] as a critical engagement with the materiality of sociological data and official archives”. Sharpe notes that Brodber’s character Ella “likens the moment of spirit possession to the feeling of a silver spear piercing through one side of her head to the other”, going on to explain that the spear leaves a trail of silver dust. Quoting from the text directly, Sharpe adds, “these particles of dust are absorbed into the brain and your whole mind becomes suffused with understanding”.

In the novel, Ella Townsend is an anthropologist, somewhat of the ilk of a Zora Neale Hurston, trained in anthropology at Colombia and hired in the 1930s as a WPA worker, sent to “retrieve the history of Blacks in South West Louisiana using oral sources” (Louisiana, 3).15 Unlike Hurston, instead of colouring within the lines of academic rules of engagement and returning with credible information, as the opening of the novel states, “Ella came under the influence of psychic forces. Today, the intellectual world understands that there are more ways of knowing than are accessible to the five senses. In 1936 when Ella Townsend received her assignment it was not so. The world is ready” (Louisiana, 4). In the novel, Ella becomes the unwitting “horse” or spirit vessel for the transfer of soul consciousness of two dead women, one from St. Mary in the state of Louisiana in the US, and the other from Louisiana in the parish of St. Mary in Jamaica. Ella hears voices and receives knowledge from both of these women, and ultimately becomes a clairvoyant who can see people’s pasts and help them relive painful and forgotten moments, as a strategy for getting over trauma and moving on with their lives. She renames herself “Louisiana”, which is not only the name of the geographic locations in two separate countries, but is also a contraction of the names of the two “spirit women”, Louise Grant and Sue Anne King, who transfer their souls and their gifts to her.

As far as Columbia and the intellectual academy is concerned, Ella “disappeared with a confidence trickster into storefront fortune-telling in receptive New Orleans”. (Louisiana) As Jennifer Sharpe argues, “Due to the incompatibility of the two discourses of science and superstition, the idea that spirits actually speak through the social scientist can only be presented as fictional rather than empirical evidence.” Sharpe states singularly, “The rules of reason cannot account for the process of understanding that [Ella] is describing, for [she] is able to access a knowledge that exceeds her own individual mind.” Sharpe argues, therefore, that if we read the spirit possession represented in the novel as literal rather than figurative, in so doing, our understanding of “the materiality of the archives, whether… textual, visual or sound recordings elicit a more intuitive, rather than rational response to a misrepresented or hidden past, thus breaking with an archival violence enacted against the dead”.

As Sharpe suggests, Brodber’s deliberate collapse of the subject/object construct in a myriad of ways in this text stages a confrontation with Western, scientific, exclusively rational ways of knowing the world. As we can see, Ella got much further, by claiming the seeming contradictions to objective reason that she confronted, than she would have had she resisted. But beyond this, the notion of collective consciousness is introduced and takes on a wildly visionary status, since Brodber draws the transfer of souls into the equation. What are we to make of this move on her part? Ancestors handing down not just written notes of their struggles but passing on their thoughts in tangible form. Ella as the character Louisiana becomes a bridge. Instead of being an “objective” observer, she makes herself part of a transtemporal matrix, sacrificing her individual psyche in order to allow others to heal. There is no structure in place in the West to systematically separate the advent of this way “to be” in the world from the skeptic abyss of psychiatric disbelief. What Brodber manages to make materialise in Louisiana is not a static notion of religious icon as healer with the power to cure. What is birthed instead is a multidimensional representation which combines the roles of doctor, community organiser, therapist and priest into a syncretic mix, one that spirals, circles and triangulates beyond the linear spectrum of time as we know it.

Sociological Fabulation: Brodber’s Response to Archival Absences

In 1996 at the Rex Nettleford Conference at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Erna Brodber gave a keynote address entitled, “Re-Engineering Black Space.” Here, she called on schooled intellectuals “to give Black children more than the legacy of slavery to carve out a Black space in this white world”. Six years earlier, Brodber had published “Fiction in the Scientific Procedure.” Like Hartman, whose notion of “fabulation” implied a creative union between archival “fact” and a narrative that attempted to fill in the plausible gaps, Brodber described how and why fiction became a part of her approach to teaching Jamaican social workers. In Hartman’s instance, the archive bequeaths limited information about the full lives of the Black persons fleetingly referenced. For Brodber, the absence of full representations in the archive was also replicated in the case studies that were taught in the various social science disciplines in Jamaica during the 1970s.

In this essay, Brodber maintains that as a sociologist, her first novel, Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, was not intended to be a literary text, rather it was part of her “sociological method”.16 She states, “My sociological effort and therefore the fiction that serves it, unlike mainstream sociology, has activist intentions: it is about studying the behavior of and transmitting these findings to the children of the people who were put on ships on the African beaches and woke up from this nightmare to find themselves on the shores of the New World”.17 While trained as a historian, it was as a post-graduate student in sociology that Brodber first concerned herself with the gaps and absences that various academic disciplines had about diasporic Black populations. Generic quantitative data was available, but it often did not represent the specificity of our experiences. Brodber states clearly at one point, “Every book on slavery was about the slave master.”18

She ran into problems with the quantitative methods used, stating that sociology would operate by saying things like, “Eighty percent of people think this or that.” Brodber noted that this did not help her to understand “who the people actually were”. This frustrated her, and as she observes, the “boredom with a social science methodology devoted to ‘objectivity’ distancing the researcher from the people and spurning the affective interaction led me into fiction”. She developed the habit of writing down her feelings before entering the field as well as her speculations about the informants’ lives that questionnaires could not penetrate. She entered one of her descriptions into a fiction contest and it won third place. This experience helped her to see that “fiction could be an opposite to quantitative work”. Her fiction writing became a more serious part of her psychotherapeutic methodological praxis.

Her fictional sketches in the field also served two other purposes. On one hand, they were a way to deal with what she describes as “prejudice against blacks in a country of blacks. The enemy was a ghost that talked through black faces” (165). She had returned to Jamaica, after experiencing the open racism in North America and England, to find an anti-black bias back home. “It was maddening, and to keep my sanity I talked on paper, reviewing from time to time what I had written before” (165). On the other hand, there was “her need to find data for her students”. She was teaching a course in “abnormal psychology”, one that “could not be sensibly taught without case studies, of which there were none. Such were the limitations of the social sciences in the Caribbean of that era” (165).19

Brodber then makes several key observations relating to traditional approaches to research in the social sciences, the biases that were inherent, and how she approached the use and creation of data in a way that would serve the African diaspora population in Jamaica. Quoted at length below, the complexity of what she assessed, conceptualised, and theorised is still formidably ground-breaking and innovative—to say nothing of the still urgent necessity of modeling what she did in contemporary academic spaces—today:

Anthropology, generally speaking, is directed by concerns that are not at all those of the researched. This is not the way of social science. Accountability has not been to the people researched, but to fellow academics. It has been my position that the native social scientist cannot operate in that way. She/he is part of the polity examined, and the conceptual framework with which she/he works as well as the way the data are presented have to take this into consideration. Thus although Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home was intended to provide information such as Erickson, Mead et al. had given to students of culture and personality, I felt that my examination of Jamaican society could not be written from the standpoint of the objective outside observer communicating to disinterested scholars. It had to incorporate my “I” and to be presented in such way that the social workers I was training saw their own “I” in the work, making this culture-in-personality study, a personal and possibly transforming work for the therapists and through them, for the clients with whom they would work. This study also had to be short enough, sharp enough, and topical enough to make its point quickly because as a poor, half-illiterate people, we have neither the time, the skills, nor the paper to deal with long works. It had to have space in which people could do their own dreaming, their own thinking, and their own planning. These considerations account for the format, content, and style of the piece. For whatever reasons, Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home finds itself on reading lists for Caribbean literature rather than Caribbean sociology. It has failed to inform sociology students.

Brodber continues:

My exposure to psychiatric anthropology, the last of my journeys in search of a methodology, showed me that my habit of writing through my feelings before entering the field was a valid methodological device. Having through writing out, rid oneself of fantasies concerning the field, the researcher is better able to see the field’s reality without this particular distortion. The fiction writing that I had been doing could, theoretically at any rate, make me a better field tool. But there was another way in which this act of writing informed my social science practice.

Before my entry into published fiction, I had researched and published two pieces in Jamaican sociology: Abandonment of Children in Jamaica (ISER, 1974) and Yards in the City of Kingston (ISER, 1975). The one rose out of the other, one providing hypotheses which the other investigated. Hypotheses for the more recent work, Yards, now needed to be examined through a longitudinal study of life in Jamaica. I needed to know if the patterns of behavior I had noticed in the two previous studies were traditional, thus requiring a particular approach to treatment, if they could at all be changed and ought to be changed. Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home was an instrument through which I thought through the cardinal problem implicit here—the relationship between history, tradition, and defense mechanisms, applying the result to the act of producing the research outline for the next academic piece. It was what the theorists call a “heuristic device”. All of this mental activity eventuated in a three-year-old field study of Afro-Jamaicans over the age of seventy, out of which had come a collection of oral histories, raw data for anyone who cares to use it, a PhD thesis on the history of the second generation of freemen in Jamaica, and several papers in oral history methodology and in Jamaican history and sociology.20

David Scott notes of Brodber’s PhD thesis, later published as The Second Generation of Freemen in Jamaica, 1907–1944, “I have long thought this work to be an historiographical intervention of unparalleled significance, demanding much more critical engagement than it has so far received”.21

In her own words from “Fiction in the Scientific Procedure”, Brodber crafted a methodology which not only utilised concrete research gathered in the field and in the archives, but she then analysed that evidence and used creative writing to gain an understanding of aspects of the raw data that were not self-evident. As she states above, “I needed to know if the patterns of behavior I had noticed in the two previous studies were traditional, thus requiring a particular approach to treatment if they could at all be changed and ought to be changed.” She describes “the cardinal problem” that she encountered as the relationship between “history, tradition and defense mechanisms”. She then went back into the field and interviewed elders over the age of seventy, with the express purpose of doing a deeper dive into some of the insights that she had gained from the data that produced the two articles previously mentioned. Along the way, she learned a great deal about oral history methodology, as well as history and sociology specific to Jamaica.

Brodber’s sociological fabulation engages in a kind of activist paradigm shift, one that was too forward thinking for her discipline at that time. Her innovative plan of attack had several features:

1. The strategic use of fiction to create more accurate and complex cultural case studies.
2. A meticulous and careful abandoning of the Western (colonial) stance of abstract objectivity, in favor of incorporating the “I” of the native social scientist into the way the research is presented.
3. The native social scientist’s insertion of his/her/their “I” functions to engage the “I” of the student learner, thus opening the door of possibility to their personal transformation and possibly those of the clients they serve.
4. Brevity and precision are taken into account in light of the external pressures facing the student learner.
5. Space is created for student learners to incorporate their own thoughts, dreams, and plans.
6. Native social scientists must write through their feelings before entering the field to eliminate or decrease the fantasies and/or biases they might have about the subjects.
7. Fiction is utilised as a “heuristic device”, i.e., as a strategy to understand and assess the problems presented by the data gathered. This aids in laying the foundation for future studies.

It is important to unpack the implications of all that Brodber states here. Scott remarks that her work is mobilised by “a social ethics of Black memory”. He notes that “what is at stake in Brodber’s work is not only an epistemological claim about access to the past. But more than that, there’s also an obligation to learn, and to learn how to learn, from the living voices from our past still with us in the present”.22 Brodber’s sociological fabulation establishes a methodological gateway, incorporating fiction, demonstrating the need for a unique approach to the education of the descendants of the enslaved. Brodber states the need succinctly: “The descendants of enslaved Africans have something experientially that continental Africans don’t have. We were sold, auctioned, transported, considered cattle as well as freed without a society being formed, and we have to find a way of handling all of this—emotionally, spiritually and psychologically”.23 Her fiction is instructive in this regard. Her fourth novel, The Rain- maker’s Mistake, directly addresses these predicaments.

The Rainmaker’s Mistake

The Rainmaker’s Mistake can be seen as Brodber’s response to both the auction block as well as the psycho-spiritual and materially existential conundrum in which diasporic Africans find themselves. Marie Sairsingh, in her analysis of this text, sees Brodber as “reshaping the genre of the historical novel to pose philosophical questions of being and to interrogate the concept of freedom within Caribbean emancipatory discourse”.24 Comparing her innovative reconceptualisation of time to the work of George Lamming, Wilson Harris and Derek Walcott, Sairsingh further argues that Brodber’s work supersedes conventional bildungsroman structures that have shaped fiction about colonialism and empire. Curdella Forbes, for her part, argues that The Rainmaker’s Mistake situates Brodber as a philosopher, cultural activist, and fiction writer par excellence, stating that “in this latest example of her ongoing search to renarrativise the history of how black space is engineered in the New World, Brodber makes a turn to the novel as fable. Yet the rigorous historical, anthropological, and philosophical imagination that energises the book complicates this designation” (1-4).25

This work appears to inaugurate a new category which could be called “emancipation sci-fi mystery”. This is a kind of Island of Dr. Moreau that meets Octavia Butler’s Kindred in the post-emancipation 1838 British West Indies. In concrete terms, we enter a world in which a six-year-old girl, Queenie, is a seemingly happy labourer on a sugar estate, one who is surprisingly eager to be incorporated into the “soon-to-be-pickney- gang” of workers. However, much to her disappointment and the astonishment of the various adult labourers, their master, Mr. Charlie, announces that they are free. In the novel, Mr. Charlie is described not only as master, but as also father and creator, and the text opens with a description of him ejaculating “his seed” into the earth and with this act creating “yams” that eventually become people. Hence Queenie, her six-year-old cohorts, as well as the adults and children both older and younger believe that they were yams created by Mr. Charlie. The already inscrutable text then takes an unexpectedly magical realist turn when one Woodville, the seeming overseer on the estate, laughs during the emancipation proclamation and generates spiritual power and energy strong enough to launch Mr. Charlie and his great house into the sky and out of orbit.

After Woodville’s act of sacrilege, another labourer, Isis, declares that her daughter Sally Water was never a yam. Woodville and Isis split off from the rest of the group, who end up on the imaginary island of Caberita, where they use their former skills

to carve out an existence, and in the case of Queenie and the “soon-to-be-pickney- gang” attempt to make philosophical sense of who they are. For the reader needing traditional historical and geographical markers from a narrative, Brodber’s text will frustrate, confuse, and even bore. Although this work has elements of mystery and intrigue, Brodber’s novel requires a disciplined, analytical reader, one with an eye for the layers of meaning behind the turn of a phrase, and one who is also a student of pre- and post-emancipation Caribbean history, since nothing in this text is accidental. The narrative voice shifts from character to character and from chapter to chapter without introduction or warning. The persistent reader realises at some point that the story’s characters have been the victims of a maniacal scientific experiment, one calculated to dramatically slow down the aging process, scramble their memory, and create a time- less slave labour force for the plantation.

The science fiction portion of the novel unfolds as we realise that Queenie and her cohort are over one hundred years old, although they are as able-bodied as teenagers. They develop the capacity to travel backwards and forwards through time. The mystery element of the text unfolds as Queenie and company try to discover why some of their members are beginning to age and what their origins really are if, in fact, they “were never really yams”. They are also in the process of understanding their relationship to their own bodies and the natural world, since the experiment not only altered their memories and retarded their growth but also suppressed their understanding of reproduction and procreation. Then, as if things weren’t complicated enough, Brodber adds mythological storytelling to the narrative map.

Attempting to provide an alternative to the simplicity of the yam story, Luke of the Caberita island males tells the children they are descended from a lost tribe with the power to fly towards the stars. As it turns out at the novel’s end, the reader discovers that the formerly enslaved residents of Caberita island were in fact descended from a fairly powerful African tribe, which previously had such a deep understanding of the natural world that they were able to manipulate the forces of nature and make rain. At a low point in their circumstances, however, the tribe’s rainmaker made a mistake, and natural disasters ensued, creating a situation in which survival involved striking a bar- gain with the likes of the Mr. Charlies of the world. Forbes argues that the rainmaker’s actual mistake was being “tricked into following the white man’s star, thereby unleashing the history of slavery that they had to endure, witness and dismantle”.

These revelations that come at the end of the text appear to have several implications. First, the extent to which Africans were accidentally, if not maliciously, complicit in the enslavement of their brethren is hinted at, although responsibility for the scientific experiment that served the purposes of greed and greed alone is squarely laid in the camp of Western industrial imperialists. Next, the text could be seen as an allegory, which relates to the current state of the descendants of enslaved Africans who are trapped in an historical, economic, spiritual, and cultural moment in which emancipation or “full free” never happened, despite the fact that the world progressed as if it did. If this is the case, then we the descendants are not only economically still suffering from the absence of reparations, but our social and cultural understanding of who we are is still stunted like the children of Caberita island.

Without this guiding knowledge, we are left, like the characters in the novel, to solve the mysteries of our past to have an adequate road map for the future. As with Queenie, there is the suggestion that we can learn a lot that we don’t know if we have the discipline, commitment, and patience to dig, sift, weigh, and consider. There is also the suggestion that we come from a power base that is more enormous than even our captors and oppressors imagine, and that we ourselves glimpse it only in moments and believe it to be true mostly in our dreams. The challenge of the present is to bring together our disparate realities of knowledge, suppressed skills—underdeveloped and unutilised—subdue our destructive tendencies, and above all else hold on to the hope that, at the end of the day, never deserted our ancestors, and made our survival and existence possible. This is the prerequisite to obtaining that elusive “full free” that has been nearly two centuries in the making.

The tale attempts to wrestle in complex ways with both a history of continental betrayal, the violence of being categorised as non-human within the European schema, as well as the hidden enormity of psycho-spiritual power that was unwittingly bequeathed to the enslaved. Brodber’s novels function as hieroglyphic clues waiting to be deciphered by future generations. The mythological elements of this tale also remind the n on-Western minded reader that Western philosophy’s approach to understanding “being” and “the senses” is the product of a particular historical and cultural reality. At the end of the day, this is only a narrow spectrum of the possibilities available for understanding the self and one’s place within time and space.

There is another unique aspect to Brodber’s project. It involves not just the inclusion but the evolution of her own “I”. In other words, her own growth and development were not separate from her research. This is a crucial point. Not only is the researcher not separate from the research into his/her/their people, but there is a recognition that “if these are your people”, then as you expose the trauma in them you can better see the trauma in yourself. It is with this in mind that we shift to look at how this aspect of Brodber’s activism culminated into her B l a c k s p a c e reasonings and what I call “ritual fabulation.”

B l a c k s p a c e and Ritual Fabulation

“Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name. Disre- membered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don’t know her name? It was not a story to pass on.” Toni Morrison26

Spirit of the dead,
Rise Up!
Lingering spirit of the dead,
Rise Up and possess your bird of passage.
Those tied bound and whipped from Brazil to Mississippi,
Step out and tell your story. Haile Gerima27

One of the three “social psychological facts” that Erna Brodber refers to in the preface to The Second Generation of Freemen in Jamaica is “the notion that anger arising out of the ancestral history of enslavement is a central part of the present-day emotional heritage”.28 As the poem cited above that opens Haile Gerima’s Sankofa as well as the ending of Toni Morrison’s Beloved attest, there are ample reasons that anger would be a part of the emotional legacy of the descendants of the enslaved in the absence of significant and substantial widespread reparations. There was no land to live on, no education designed to meet our collective needs, no respect for the spiritual or cultural beliefs of our ancestors. There was no attempt to establish religious and political institutions that were premised on our cultural ways of knowing. The legacy of anger makes sense as a response.

The violence recorded in the archive and the disenfranchisement of the partially freed, incompletely emancipated Black subjects was the point of departure for both Brodber’s research interests as well as her methodological employment of fiction. In addition, her focus after the research and writing she did in the 1970s shifted to the internalisation of these histories of violence and their redirection among those who no longer saw each other as “kin”. In an interview with her about the beginnings of the B l a c k s p a c e reasonings that took place at her house in the village of Woodside, she remarks:

Before the beginning of my work in this village, someone was actually murdered, beaten up by a truckload of people from the neighboring village of Kilancholy. They had accused this man of coming to their village and stealing. And the rest of us here, just kind of listened while the shouts and screaming was going on. And I myself, I just simply closed my doors and my windows and took my typewriter to another room. And when I realized the next day that the fellow had died and was beaten to death, he was finally taken from here to the other village and beaten to death, I said No! This cyaan (cannot) happen! We cannot live in a community where somebody comes in and takes somebody from the village and it’s just another day at work. So I got together with the youth in the village, and I hoped that looking at their history would build some sort of self-esteem. (79)29

The Kilancholy incident was an example of violence internal to diasporic Black spaces, inherited from the external violence of slavery. Brodber’s goal across the course of her multifaceted scholarly and organic intellectual career has been to contribute to “completing the task of emancipation” by working on the collective public and private Black self. This involves reconstructing failed kinship relations, remembering and reminding us that there were times that we worked together across our differences, and suggesting that we can resist being at the mercy of externally constructed divisions.30

When the Kilancholy incident occurred in 1985, Brodber had already published one novel and several significant sociological essays. She had already developed a profound interest in the gap between the “anglo-conformity” required to do academic writing, and the cultural production and lived reality of the cartographers of reggae, dancehall, Zion Revival and Kumina. She had rebelled against “Babylon’s system” with both her personal involvement with Rastafari as well as with her radical choice to move back to Woodside, the rural village community of her birth. The Kilancholy incident also propelled a shift in her research, writing and community praxis. It launched the beginnings of what later became the Emancipation Summer School and the B l a c k s p a c e reasonings.31 She invited the village youth to her home, telling them that she had nothing to offer them “except what was in her head”. But this simple act of intellectual generosity inaugurated a pedagogical praxis that I would refer to as “communagogy”, one in which reciprocal learning happened between her and the village community. She states:

So they would come to my house and we would read books which had to do with us and our history. And the writers of those books, people like Jamaican scholars George Beckford and Swithin Wilmot, would come down, and sit with about fifteen youth and explain what they were trying to do in their books. Very often we could not reach any further than the preface of the book because we in the village were not readers, really. Some of us could not read at all. Swithin had done some work on the history of the parish of St. Mary where the village was, and by this time, the group of fifteen had widened greatly and old people were coming as well. An old lady I was getting ready to take home said, “When my history is being discussed I don’t move!” Others asked: “Why haven’t we been taught this?” So it caught on. People wanted to know about their history and so that is what led me to write the book The People of My Jamaican Village. (80)32

Brodber’s work in this text coincided with her research on the second generation of freemen and freewomen. The septuagenarians that she had interviewed for that project had grandparents who had lived through the emancipation process. In 1962, Independence from Britain had replaced Emancipation as a national holiday. But the elders she interviewed were angry about this, saying, “Oonoo dish out fus a augus.”33 Emancipation for them had been a sacred holiday. She reported tales of elders who on August 1st would sit on their porches in silence, dressed from head to toe in white clothes. She said those old folks “gave her an order”, one which involved restoring the memories of what their ancestors had been through to younger generations. Brodber’s report on what the elders said, was read in the House of Commons and contributed to the reinstatement of Emancipation Day as a national holiday in Jamaica.34

Working with village residents who had a strong memory of things past, Brodber helped to organise an Emancipation celebration, indigenous to the Woodside community, one that was a ritual re-enactment of what people in that community had done on August 1st in 1838. On the morning of August 1st, the old people chanted while stamping their feet:

Thank you, Massa God, for this blessed August morning!
Thank you, Massa God, for this blessed August morning!

Those of us visiting Woodside would begin the day with this chant. We would then proceed with community residents to walk to the top of a hill in the community where the first church used to be. There are no remnants of it anymore, it is a wide-open field now. But we would stand in a circle, sing some of the Emancipation songs that had been passed down, while the Rasta drummers kept a beat. We would reason about topics of interest. One year it was the physical appearance of the historical Christ. If he existed, what did he look like?

After the open-air service there would be a break, and sometimes householders in the community would provide breakfast for those of us who were visiting. Then in the afternoon, the centerpiece of Emancipation Day would be a re-enactment play, written and revised each year by Brodber, and performed by village residents and some of us visitors. The play was Brodber’s brainchild. While all the re-enactment activities were significant, this theatrical re-enactment of what the people in Woodside may have thought of Queen Victoria’s emancipation proclamation is the definition of what I refer to here as ritual fabulation.

Brodber wrote and revised a “fabulative” imagining of what various villagers may have thought of the emancipation proclamation. Some of the characters imagined were entirely fictitious. Others, the majority, were based on actual historically existing, formerly enslaved village residents like: Sarah Williams, Mary Andrew, Selina Montague, Pamela Cunningham, as well as those with surnames such as Ferguson, Binnings, and Kelley—all of whom were listed by name as the property of Dr. William J. Nielson’s Woodside Estate in 1817.35 In the play, some speak of wanting to return to Africa and wondering if ships will be provided; some speak of having been manumitted; some speak of relatives still remembered who were left behind; some recall the traumas of punishment, such as being rolled in molasses and put in ants’ nests. But one of the most significant aspects of this ritual fabulative reenactment was the fact that some of the village participants in the performance were the literal descendants of the people whose parts they were playing.

Brodber created a situation in which those in the community who had limited knowledge of what had taken place gained insight into what had happened in that land space, possibly to their own relations. I remember coming to a kind of surprised recognition that the enslaved folk were ordinary, everyday people who spoke and thought as we do now. For some reason, this felt like a revelation. I, too, had drunk the statistical Kool-Aid, subconsciously presuming that the enslaved were, if not another species, a group so different from those of us living now that we could only wonder at what their thoughts and feelings might have been.

There was something also to be said for doing some of the things that others before us, whose ancestors were similar to our own, had also done, like marching together around the estate while singing songs.

Slave before
But we nuh slave no more
Bury mi foot chain
Dung inna market square!

We had been cut loose from the root. Some of us had a grandparent or grand cousin who had heard something, a joke or a rumour about what might have happened to an ancestor, and passed it on. Those of us who were one generation or more into the middle class didn’t know a psycho-spiritual limb had been amputated. We believed that “A” grades and good schools were the passports to personhood. But the re-enactment, “like even the most angry mother, drew us back”.36

While the Emancipation celebration was a village affair, Brodber’s larger goal was to explore “the links between the way of life forged by the people of two points of the black diaspora, the Afro-Americans and the Afro-Jamaicans”. Her further political concern was the fact that “black initiative is weakened by the misunderstanding between Caribbean and US blacks and both of them with Africans” (167).37 To this end, she argued that “Black people (from various parts of the continent and the diaspora) needed a private space to work out their differences”. Therein lay the basis for her creation of the reasoning sessions known later as B l a c k s p a c e. She purposefully spaces out the letters to symbolize our right to be here, as opposed to always feeling as if we are “cotching on a corner” of white space. Anyone who considers themselves partially or fully the descendant of an enslaved African is welcome, and others of African descent who are interested in the relationship between their reality and those of the descendants are also welcome. There has been controversy about the exclusion of those who are not descendants of either enslaved Africans or continental Africans. Brodber is not opposed to dialogue with these other groups of people with equally complex identities. But that discussion is for another space. For her, the privileging of conversations specific to Black people in B l a c k s p a c e reminds us of our unfinished business, which is so easy to ignore and forget, since we are not a priority in many spaces. It reminds us that the task of emancipation is still incomplete.

A Curing Thinking: The Afterlife of Livity

As part of the process of self-healing in the Jamaica of the 1970s, Brodber gravitated towards the Rasta worldview and way of life. She described Rastafari, at its best, as

“a curing thinking”, a practice and strategy that helped Black people to cleanse their bodies, minds, and spirits from the negative effects of colonialism. She saw it as helping us to recognise that love could be “there” between us, despite the oppression of the past. At its best, it allowed for a person-to-person, internal sense of spiritual aware- ness to develop. She saw Rastafari as making this more possible than, say, Catholicism, since, as she states, it began with making your life clean. Clean in terms of the food you eat, the relationships you have; it forced an examination of self.38 Her clear and simple explanation of how this ideology shaped her life and the lives of others with a similar view of its power can be described, using the language of Rastafari, as a kind of

“livity” praxis.

In the present academic moment, there has been much said about the afterlife of slavery. All of Erna Brodber’s work as well as that of other scholars of Afro-modernity attests to this fact. Yet the Black consciousness that the Rastafari rebel yell of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and others projected into the universe came with a re-engineering of Black speech in a clever way, one that re-articulates the language of our oppressors in the hopes of “fabulating” our way out of their matrix. In this universe:

Politics = Politricks
Old library = Ole lie bury
Community = Come Unity.

Taking a page from this Ital-“I”-tology, we forward one more
Slavery
Slave
Drop the “s” and replace the “a” with an “I”
Like “I” and “I”
Slave
Live
Live-ry
Live-We
We live
Livity.

Endnotes

1. Erna Brodber, interview for the documentary on Brodber’s life, A View from the Field, conducted by Catherine John 2 July, 2018. Eleven minutes and ten seconds in.
2. Erna Brodber, “Fiction in the Scientific Procedure,” in Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference, ed. by Selwyn Cudjoe (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1990), 165.
3. Brodber, “Fiction in the Scientific Procedure,” 164.
4. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
5. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26 (2008): 1-14.
6. Carolyn Cooper, “Afro-Jamaican Folk Elements in Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home,” in Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1990), 279-288.
7. Daryl Cumber Dance, “Go Eena Kumbla: A Comparison of Erna Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home and Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters in Caribbean Women Writers: Essay from the First International Conference” (Wellesley: Calaloux Publications, 1990), 169-186.
8. Carole Boyce Davies & Elaine Savory Fido, Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1990).
9. Simone Drake, “Gendering Diasporic Migration in Erna Brodber’s Louisiana,” Macomère: Journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars, Vol. 8 (2006): 112-135.
10. Suzanna Engman, “Haunting Literature of the Americas: The Ghosts in Wilson Harris’ Jonestown and Erna Brodber’s Louisiana,” in Critical Perspectives on Caribbean Literature and Culture (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 102-120.
11. Maria Cristina Fumagalli, “Romances that Matter: Lady Mary Wroth’s The Countesse of Mountgomerie Urania and Erna Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home” in Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2009).
12. Curdella Forbes, “Redeeming the Word: Religious Expression as Liberation in Erna Brodber’s Fiction,” Postcolonial Text, 3, No. 1 (2007).
13. June Roberts, “Erna Brodber’s Louisiana: An Alter- native Aesthetic, or Oral Authority in the Written Text,” Literary Griot 14, nos. 1-2 (2002): 75-93; and Angeletta K. M. Gourdine, “Carnival-Conjure, Louisiana, History, and the Power of Women’s Ethnographic Narrative,” Ariel 35, nos. 3-4 (2004): 139-58.
14. Jenny Sharpe, “When Spirits Talk: Reading Erna Brodber’s Louisiana for Affect,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 16:3 39 (2012): 91.
15. Erna Brodber, Louisiana (London: New Beacon Books, 1994).
16. Erna Brodber, Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home(London: New Beacon Books, 1980).
17. Brodber, “Fiction in the Scientific Procedure,” 164.
18. Erna Brodber, interview for the documentary on Brodber’s life, A View from the Field, conducted by Catherine John 2 July, 2018.
19. Brodber, “Fiction in the Scientific Procedure,” 165.
20. Brodber, “Fiction in the Scientific Procedure,” 167.
21. David Scott, “Preface: Erna Brodber’s Social Ethics of Black Memory,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 26:2 68 (2022): vii-x.
22. David Scott, “Preface: Erna Brodber’s Social Ethics of Black Memory,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 26:2 68 (2022): vii-x.
23. Erna Brodber, interview for the documentary on Brodber’s life, A View from the Field, conducted by Catherine John 2 July, 2018. Three minutes and twenty-five seconds in.
24. Marie Sairsingh, “The Rainmaker’s Mistake: Reshaping the Genre of Historical Fiction,” The CLR James Journal, Vol. 25, Issue 1/2 (2019): 81-106.
25. Curdella Forbes, “The Rainmaker’s Mistake,” Postcolonial Text, Vol. 5, No. 3 (2009): 1-4.
26. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987).
27. Sankofa, directed by Haile Gerima (Washington, DC: Mypheduh Films, 1993).
28. Erna Brodber, The Second Generation of Freemen in Jamaica, 1907–1944 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004).
29. John, “Caribbean Organic Intellectual: The Legacy and Challenge of Erna Brodber’s Life Work,” 79.
30. Brodber’s most recent historical text, Moments of Co- operation and Incorporation: African Americans and African Jamaicans, 1782–1996 (2019), is an example of the “togetherness work” that has been part of the history of the descendants of enslaved Africans who arrived in the Americas.
31. I first got involved with assisting Brodber with the Emancipation Summer School in 2001. I went back to Woodside to assist in both Emancipation and B l a c k s p a c e for ten summers. translates as: “You all abandoned the emancipation celebration.”
32. Erna Brodber, interview for the documentary on Brodber’s life, A View from the Field, conducted by Catherine John 2 July, 2018. Thirty-nine minutes in. Brodber’s research into the history of the village exposed, among other things, that the area had been a coffee estate owned by the Nielson family. There was a place in the village called Daddy Rock where the enslaved used to gather in secret. She discovered that on the eve of emancipation the newly freed people had a vigil with drumming and dancing, and they also built their first church at the top of the hill in the community. She discovered that on Emancipation Day they had marched around the former estate and then had a “free will feast”, one in which village residents brought food to share with one another. The Anglican church in the community used to be the great house, and approximately seventeen families currently residing in the village had been there since the days of slavery.
33. Erna Brodber, Woodside Pear Tree Grove P.O. (Mona: University of the West Indies Press, 2004), 58-61.
34. Michelle Cliff, The Land of Look Behind (Ithaca: Fire- brand Books, 1985), 102-103.
35. Brodber, “Fiction in the Scientific Procedure,” 167.
36. Erna Brodber, interview for the documentary on Brodber’s life, A View from the Field, conducted by Catherine John 2 July, 2018. Thirteen to fifteen minutes in.