Abstract
Increasingly, African diasporic communities in the English-speaking Americas recognize humor’s subversive and creative potential. Still, despite the strategy’s prominence in groundbreaking Caribbean works such as C. L. R. James’ Minty Alley (1936), George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin (1953), Una Marson’s poetry, and Derek Walcott’s bawdy plays, Caribbean literary scholarship has been slower to acknowledge that potential. Patricia Mohammed pinpoints various colonial and African diasporic contexts that necessitated the use of disruptive strategies like humor that had long served Caribbean individuals’ ancestors. As both Mohammed and Henry Louis Gates Jr. indicate, many of the traditional discursive tools not only survived the Middle Passage, but, in fact, dominated diasporic authors’ assertions of selfhood in New World contexts. Specifically, Mohammed alludes to a powerful humor that “transforms cultural values” during revolutionary moments and allows “the unpalatable to be evoked and easily digested.”2 The discussion that follows explores humor’s productive interrogation of relationships within Caribbean communities, particularly between Westerners and non-Westerners.3 Because of a long-standing tendency to combine non-Western and Western practices, this project examines the ways in which humor merges with orality and appropriation, or what I define as “literary crossing,” to introduce formal and ideological African diasporic cultural interventions into appropriated works.
The fact that a particular set of cultural values is selected and transformed in the colonial process by a people is not accidental. Perceived differences among people in any community are constantly being reinforced to accommodate the demands of society, as for example, the caste/occupational divisions in India, the class/status hierarchy of Britain, or the color/ethnic hierarchy of the United States … This process of changing class and status has often involved radical, and violent, and revolutionary struggles … Humor allows the unpalatable to be evoked and easily digested, and more dislodges repressed thoughts and images that influence conscious interaction.
—Patricia Mohammed, “A Blueprint for Gender in Creole Trinidad”
Esu-Elegbara … is a tempter, engaging in “trickery” to prove “philosophical and aesthetic points” … The tempter is concerned not with his/her act of trickery, or with his/her hermeneutical prowess, but rather with the hermeneutical process …
—Heather Russell, Legba’s Crossing
Anyone who analyzes black literature must do so as a comparativist, by definition, because our canonical texts have complex double formal antecedents, the Western and the black … Repetition and revision are fundamental to black artistic forms.
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifing Monkey
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Notes
Patricia Mohammed, “A Blueprint for Gender in Creole Trinidad: Exploring Gender Mythology through Calypsos of the 1920s and 1930s.” The Culture of Gender and Sexuality in the Caribbean, ed. Linden Lewis (Florida: UP of Florida, 2003), 135, 137.
In discussing the Caribbean, distinctions between Western and non-Western are perilous. For this reason, in this discussion, the terms Western and non-Western suggest general rather than absolute differences. After all, the region’s sociopolitical life has long been deeply intertwined with the urban centers in Europe and the United States. Still, the hierarchical connotations embedded in these terms and the vast disparities between these geopolitical spaces remain and warrant such attention. Contrary to recent claims that we are “post” many of these tensions, deep fissures between European, Euro-Creole, Afro-Creole, and other communities were not only present during the periods in which my primary authors were writing but continue to thrive. Therefore, as Shalini Puri argues in another context, there is a real as well as an “analytic danger in losing sight of those inequalities.” Shalini Puri, The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 65.
Edward Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice: The Development ofNation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (London: New Beacon Books, 1984), 116, 167–8;
Lawrence Breiner, An Introduction to West Indian Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), 59–79. Although the literary tradition is relatively new, humor has been dominant in the folktales, songs, and jokes in the Caribbean for centuries and is, of course, also central to racist jokes and literature that denigrated blacks during and after slavery.
John Lowe, Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cosmic Comedy (Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1994). Lowe has also argued that much of Chesnutt’s oeuvre marks the first extensive treatment of humor in the African American literary tradition (18).
Ironically, Claude McKay, the Jamaican author most often cited as heralding the emergence of Anglophone Caribbean literature, is also often subsumed under the umbrella of the Harlem Renaissance, as a noteworthy African American contributor. Furthermore, the importance of scholars such as Katherine Dunham and Zora Neale Hurston in recording African diasporic cultural practices in the Caribbean is indisputable. Such cultural exchanges support Brent Edwards’ apt observation that the Harlem Renaissance was an international phenomenon. Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003), 4–10.
For example, there is considerably more scholarly criticism on works such as Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2001 [1939]), or
Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1970) and Omeros (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1972). Humor pervades Bennett’s work, and several scholars, including Ifeona Fulani in “Caribbean Women Writers and the Politics of Style” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 17 (March 2005) and
Carolyn Cooper in “That Cunny Jamma Oman: Representations of Female Sensibility in the Poetry of Louise Bennett” Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995), have made important contributions to discussions about Bennett’s use of irony and the Anancy trickster figure (Fulani 64–79, Cooper 47–67). Yet a broader analysis of Bennett’s humor reveals critical issues that receive little attention.
Luigi Pirandello, On Humor (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1960), 131.
Glenda R. Carpio, Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery: Laughing Fit to Kill (New York: Oxford UP, 2008), 6.
Patricia Mohammed, “A Blueprint for Gender in Creole Trinidad: Exploring Gender Mythology through Calypsos of the 1920s and 1930s,” The Culture of Gender and Sexuality in the Caribbean, ed. Linden Lewis (Florida: UP of Florida, 2003), 137;
Mel Watkins, On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying—The Underground Tradition of African American Humor That Transformed American Culture, From Slavery to Richard Pryor (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 81.
Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1963), 90–91.
Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudlesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (New York: Macmillan, 1911), 65.
Simon Critchley, On Humor (New York: Routledge, 2002), 67.
See Mike Yard’s performance in P. Diddy Presents the Bad Boys of Comedy-Season 2 (HBO Home Video, 2007), DVD.
Joanne Gilbert, Performing Marginality: Humor, Gender, and Cultural Critique (Wayne State UP. May 2004), 172.
For other salient discussions of the trickster in different African diasporic contexts see, Roger Abrahams’ The Man of Words in the West Indies: Performance and the Emergence of Creole Culture (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983),
Walter Jeckyl’s Jamaican Song and Story: Annancy Stories, Digging Sings, Ring Tunes, and Dancing Tunes (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1966), Peter Roberts “The Misinterpretation of Brer Anancy,” Folklore 99.1 (1988),
Daryl Cumber Dance’s Folklore from Contemporary Jamaica (Memphis, TN: U of Tennessee P, 1985),
Andrew Salkey’s Anancy’s Score (London: Bogle L’Ouverture, 1973),
Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s The Signifying Monkey (New York: Oxford UP, 1988),
Wilson Harris’ “Creoleness: The Crossroads of a Civilization,” Selected Essays of Wilson Harris: The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination, ed. A. J. M. Bundy (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). More recently, Jeremy Poynting’s “From Ancestral to Creole” usefully outlines the influences of various cultural, racial, and ethnic communities in the construction of the Caribbean trickster figure. Kandioura Dramé’s “The Trickster as Triptych” and Heather Russell’s Legba’s Crossing also offer pointed observations about the trickster’s specific relevance for contemporary discourses.
Joyce Jonas, Anancy in the Great House: Ways of Reading West Indian Fiction (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1990), 2.
Antonio Benitez-Rojo, The Repeating Island (Durham & London: Duke UP, 1992), 4.
Heather Russell, Legba’s Crossing: Narratology in the African Atlantic (Athens and London: U of Georgia P, 2009), 9.
Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 225.
J. Lee Green, The Diasporan Self: Unbreaking the Circle in Western Black Novels (Charlottesville, VA: U of Virginia P, 2008), 11.
James Clifford, “Diasporas,” Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997), 245.
Brent Hayes Edwards, “The Uses of Diaspora,” Social Text—66 19:1 (Spring 2001): 45.
Patrick Chamoiseau, Solibo Magnificent (New York: Pantheon, 1998), 176.
Lloyd W. Brown, West Indian Poetry (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1978), 150.
Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (Charlottesville, VA: U of Virginia P, 1992), 21.
Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006).
Julie Sanders, Adaptation andAppropriation (New York: Routledge, 2006).
Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean (Mona, Jamaica: Savacou Publications, 1974), 15.
Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (New York: Routledge, 1995), 8, 18–26.
J. Michael Dash, “Introduction,” Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, Edouard Glissant (Charlottesville, VA: U of Virginia P, 1992), xxix.
Wilson Harris, Tradition, the Writer and Society: Critical Essays (London: New Beacon, 1967), 50.
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© 2012 Sam Vásquez
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Vásquez, S. (2012). Introduction: Take Bad Something Make Laugh: The Emergence of Humor in the Caribbean Literary Tradition. In: Humor in the Caribbean Literary Canon. New Caribbean Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137031389_1
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