Before The Arrivants becomes a dim memory, here’s a post-mortem. You’re free to just hit the “back” button, of course, but particularly if you’re thinking of turning out a paper on some aspect of the trilogy, you may want to read on, if only for the sake of review. I should start by reiterating what fine analysis the working duos did, even if it sometimes got abbreviated in the reporting (or upstaged by Yours Truly). But in the aftermath of all this, I thought it might be useful to complement that "detail" work by pulling back and looking once more at the big picture, the grand sweep of things. (I’ll warn you: once I got started, I got a little carried away here. But bear with me: I hope you’ll find this worth reading through to the end. Much of it is a recap of what we did together in class; some of it is new.)

We didn't end up talking much about the titles of the books of the trilogy, but one way of taking the first volume’s title is as a kind of complaint about the “Rights” that never really seem to have been awarded New World blacks for having completed the “Passage” out of Africa, through slavery and colonialism, and into Western modernity. The poems we worked on in class were pretty representative of the book as a whole, I think: it’s a tragic, demoralized, sometimes cynical, lament on harbor / -less, root / -less wandering; and near the end of the volume, the speaker (who assumes a number of different personae throughout the trilogy, but whom I’ll refer to conveniently as “the poet”) is left wondering, “Where then is the nigger’s / home?”

“Masks,” as we suggested, is a diffident attempt to answer that question by travelling back across the Middle Passage and re-learning the mythic past from which “All [Tom’s] Chillun” have been cut off—seemingly with their own consent. Yet what the poet finds there is not exactly a homecoming or a triumphant rediscovery of “Roots!,” but rather a bewildering history that’s simultaneously awesome and tainted, and whose path is almost predestined to terminate in terrible, self-destructive tragedy. It’s a past that an orphaned “stranger” who’s been unalterably alienated “after three hundred years” (124) can’t exactly “reclaim,” but only “borrow” (148). (You Can’t Go Home Again, as the old saying has it.) But by wearing those borrowed clothes, by ritually putting on those ancestral masks and temporarily assuming their identity, he’s nevertheless begun to figure out how to “incarnate” the power that comes with them—i.e., how to “eat the gods” (116), ingest/digest those divine forces, and shit them out as something new. (And he’s also got a glimpse of how to keep that “new shit” from falling into terminal decay by “dancing” it across limbo and onto a new plane of being: “Adowa” (117) is both a funeral dance and a dance of possession, a dance to usher the departed into the next world and to “ground” the dancer in the way Brathwaite speaks of on 271.) So with the aid of kyerema, God’s mouthpiece-and-drummer, the poet has humbly begun to achieve a dim awakening at the end of “Masks.” God is “dumb / dumb / dumb” (185) until the drum speaks, and at the end of “Masks,” the poet’s embryonic tongue is beginning—maybe—to uncurl. The trajectory of the trilogy's final volume, “Islands,” then, is largely that of the “waking” journey from muteness into speech/song/shout, the slow, stutter-step recovery of the creative power of the Word.

But upon returning to the “Islands,” the poet finds that things are still in that nebulous, transitional state—they’re still “in limbo,” which is not only, theologically speaking, a fuzzy frontier (or a shore, a “Littoral,” 170) between one world and the next, one state of being or consciousness and the next, the life the New World has apparently lost and the afterlife or rebirth it has yet to find; it’s also an Afro-Caribbean slave dance that’s now become a hackneyed nightclub act for tourists—a “fakeway” rather than a folkway. But like Tom’s “hat in hand,” the coon-show smile with which the limbo dance is sometimes performed hides a deeper hurt: the limbo deliberately recalls, like the Baldwin quote on 160, the survival of a recurring ordeal. With each successful passage in the limbo dance, the bar is set still lower and the body becomes even more cramped and contorted, just as in the stifling confines of the slave ships that brought Afro-Caribbeans to the Americas. (See “Caliban,” 194.)

So the limbo ritualizes an awful sort of “survival” from Africa, one that lands you here on the other side, but contorted, crippled. And that, I think, is what's being held up for us as a basic condition of New World experience. It’s in that same guise that we see another couple of survivals from Africa: the Yoruba trickster/creator Ananse (or Anancy, the spider) and the Dahomean trickster/god of new beginnings Elegba (the monkey), who appear as the blind fisherman spinning his net (170) and as the lame veteran leaning on his crutch (174), respectively. (“The streets of my home have their own gods,” says the poet, 189; “they can walk up out of the sea / into our houses.”). But here in the new world, having passed under that metaphorical limbo-stick, both Ananse are Elegba are debased, diminished, fallen gods: Anancy is a cunning survivor who once had creative powers but who was burnt and blackened in a fire; Legba has been similarly maimed or disabled—he’s a burnt-out Makak rather than a nimble monkey-god.

Still, we know what eventually rises out of the ashes. And Legba is still the necessary starting-point for this resurrection: like kyerema, he’s an intercessor, a mediator between gods & humans, and also (fittingly) the guardian of the crossroads, who shepherds us slowly, circuitously towards a vision of creative possibility. It’ll take time before Legba can be fully invoked in his restored capacity as a god of new beginnings, much less before Ananse can be invoked in her capacity as creator (in “Veve,” 263-6). But first, Legba must nevertheless be encountered, confronted, as history’s cripple. Even in the “Epilogue” (81) to “Rights,” the poet foresaw this: before a new world could be named, before a green world could be resurrected from the ashes, before the carcass could “rise / rise / rise / in the butter- / flies of a new / and another / morning” (81-2), Tom’s children would, like Ananse, have to pass through the purging fire of the apocalypse, the holocaust, the volcanic “brugg-a-lung-go” (66 & elsewhere) of “The Dust.” (After all: “There is no / turning back,” 85.) Then, with luck, they might come out the other side, well-tempered, like iron that’s passed through the blacksmith’s furnace. That’s the promise of eventual redemption that we also glimpse in another old spiritual that James Baldwin quoted in the title of another one of his books (I mentioned this several times in class): “God gave Noah the rainbow sign: / No more water, the fire next time.”

So like Caliban, the poet will take a “hot / slow / step / on the burning ground” (195) (or perhaps the scorched earth, the “cracked” ground, on which he’s been poured out (187), in a kind of new world libation), out of limbo and through Legba’s open gate to a new day (“jou’vert,” pronounced zhoo-vay, from the French “jour ouvert,” “opened day,” daybreak: the predawn wake-up celebration that begins Carnival), where the holy spirit will breathe life into him with a tongue of flame. And then the poet will possess that fire—a force that was previously the instrument of his own devastation. He’ll channel it, direct it, control it, like the rebellious slaves setting fire to the canefields with burning torches—a historical act that’s ritually commemorated in another carnival ritual called “Canboulay” (from the French “cannes brulées,” “burnt cane”). He’ll be possessed by, electrified by—that is, he’ll both conduct and “ground”—the voice of the new gods. Will they still speak via the talking drum, as they did in Africa? Nope: the gods have now been translated, after all--borne across the White River--and so the drum has been transfigured into a new drum—the steel drum—forged, after repeated suppression of other forms of Afro-Caribbean drumming, out of the detritus of industrial society (namely, cast-off oil barrels). (And those who've seen the tracing on the face of the steel drum, otherwise known as the “pan,” know that it looks remarkably like Anancy’s spider-web.) Talk about “twist[ing] music out of hunger” (41): take that, V. S. Naipal!

We’ll see what other kinds of “music” got wrung out of equally “hungry” circumstances starting Monday, I guess. Hope that you’re enjoying the dub poetry, and that no one’s running into hair-pulling technical difficulties.