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80 CHAPTER 3 From the Darker Side of a Schism PERFORMANCE AND THE PROPHETIC MASQUE Don’t even try, stranger, to understand it. —David Rudder, “Tales from a Strange Land II: Crossing The Bridge” Me speak to all the children. Me speak to everything that moveth and liveth pon the earth. . . . And me say what me see ina dem heye [what I see in their eyes]. Me see [what] type of intention ina dem heye—a where music is. Me no know if me ha dem look dey, you know. But me know which musician me can look pon and know if im is a real musician. —Bob Marley, “Talkin” (track 3), Talkin’ Blues We never thought of the lyric. The lyric was there, it was cute, but we didn’t think of what it meant; but at that time, nobody else would think of it either, because we weren’t as morally open as we are today and so, a lot of stuff—really—no excuses—just went over our heads. —Andrews Sisters, in John Sforza, Swing It The Caribbean rhetor’s expressions of language, culture, and identity articulate an ethos that grows out of the internalization and subsequent externalization of rhetorical strategies, practices, and tradition as public performance; each performance embodies the idea that who feels it, knows it, and who knows it, tells it. Consistent with the operation of the carnivalesque in the conception of cultural identity and rhetoric, the music of Caribbean people is a collaboratively composed record of Caribbeanness, of the ways in which knowledge is created , distributed, appropriated, manipulated, and then redistributed as tradition on public display in the shifting and constraining contexts of local and trans- From the Darker Side of a Schism 81 national life. As both the bearer and distributor of that knowledge, the most effective performer will be one who embodies and can combine the various sensibilities of his or her audience to address issues that unfold beyond the immediate discourse community. For while we vernacular rhetors may well face a shared supranational imperative to which we perhaps can all aspire collectively, we simultaneously feel the sway of myriad subnational characteristics supplying the terministic screens that filter such an imperative for us. As members of an audience in need either of guidance or affirmation, we depend on the performer to negotiate those poles of differing sensibilities for us—and with us—because the critical consciousness we ultimately seek relies on the synthesis of things felt (perceived) and things understood (conceived). Rhetorical maneuvers of this sort are as prevalent in their contemporary forms as they were historically, albeit significantly less popularized than are other , more commercially buoyant but vacuous counterparts in music (and cultural production more generally). Performers have nonetheless managed to retain a pattern of rhetorical motive and performance that comes out of attempts to reconcile tradition with innovation or to tailor each to the other in ways that matter. And what does this require of the performer? Above all, it requires a more than passing familiarity with the features being deployed, something like a shared understanding of the many degrees of rhetorical effectiveness that the tradition’s various modes provide. This shared understanding is significantly determined by the creativity of masqued displays in the areas of confrontation, disputation, and direct instruction. This fact would be lost on performers such as the Andrews Sisters and Robert Mitchum, people who, enamored with calypso music, failed to grasp the significance of songs such as “Rum and Coca-Cola” (a criticism of the U.S. occupation of Trinidad during World War II and the consequent erosion of social order) in the way they were intended. So to the initial sayings, I add another dimension: who don’t hear will feel. At least, that is the saying as I remember it (and use it). In common usage, the saying is an ominous component in the catalog of cautionary phrases. It is usually deployed as an unmasked threat of reprisal, censure, or some other form of punishment issued by one powerful entity—say, a stern mother or a repressive government—over an entity that, either unaware of its lack of power or unhappy with it, proves itself a resistant upstart, a “hardened” child, perhaps, or more important in the Caribbean experience, an urban underclass. I want to introduce an alternative reading of the phrase, however, one that more effectively frames audience reception in the specific context of vernacular epideictic activity, which I discussed in chapter...

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