When the Devil Knocks: The Congo Tradition and the Politics of Blackness in Twentieth-Century Panama by Renée Alexander Craft, (review)

The last time I became violently ill was the night I dined with a devil and my mother-in-law. There is a place near my home in Bedford-Stuyvesant that opened in the midst of Central Brooklyn’s rejiggered demographics. It’s decorated like its neighboring brown-stones with high tin ceilings, darkly stained mahogany furnishings, and mismatched antique artifacts that evoke a person who’s lived a life. Just that afternoon, a copy of Renée Alexander Craft’s When the Devil Knocks: The Congo Tradition and the Politics of Blackness in Twentieth-Century Panama arrived at my doorstep for me to review for this journal.

I sat with my Panamanian wife and our two sons and her mother with her mother’s companion, a devil. I knew my mother-in-law was familiar with the Portobelo area of Panama where Craft dedicates much of her study, so I managed together a few questions to whet my appetite for Craft’s ethnographic review of Panama’s oldest known form of African cultural expression. I plowed through my Prince Edward Island mussels steeped in coconut curry as I asked her if she’d been to the small coastal town of Portobelo. Yes, she had. I asked her if she knew of the Congo ceremony with its elaborate song and dance and costume and lore. Yes, she’d seen it. My knowledge of the custom was scant and her clipped responses offered little in the way of follow up. The conversation moved and I failed to steer it back to the research findings of the Communications and Global Studies Assistant Professor from North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I decided to focus my attention on my shellfish for the rest of the evening, resolved to reengage her after reading When the Devil Knocks.

My mother-in-law’s dinner companion, an old friend visiting from Panama, was not unfamiliar to me. He is a well-known tailor who travels annually to Brooklyn to outfit the Panamanian cohort who sways down the tree-lined Eastern Parkway promenade during the West Indian Day Parade every September. What I did not know at the time, however, was that he is a practitioner of the Congo Devil performance outlined at length in Craft’s When the Devil Knocks. I was not prepared to engage him and he did not tip his hand. My pre-reading recon was a failure. Making matters worse, the coconut curry mussels I scarfed were past their due date or otherwise improperly prepared, leaving me to spend the late evening hours huddled over a toilet in regret.

The next day, my wife told me of the Congo background possessed of her mother’s friend. Anxious to gain the devil-tailor’s insights, I devoured Craft’s book in the hopes of digesting enough of it to have a meaningful conversation with him before he completed his costuming and returned to Panama. I spent a few days in Panama a year prior, combing for information regarding its African heritage as I share Craft’s lament of Panama being an understudied part of the world (31). Craft characterizes her own work as performance-centered critical ethnography to ask intriguing questions,

How and why did an African-descended community whose performance traditions celebrate their unique Black cultural heritage in Panama choose not to self-identify with sociopolitical constructions of Blackness during various moments of the twentieth century? What is the relationship between the Congo Carnival traditions of Panama and the history of twentieth-century Panamanian etnia negra culture, politics, and representation? On what basis and through what means have Afro-Colonials and West Indians negotiated their relationship with each other in the twentieth century? How have Congo articulations of the meaning and purpose of their tradtion fit alongside those imposed on them by other ethnic nationals and the State...