The Ellisonian Injunction: Discourse on a Lower Frequency (review)

Masking and Power: Carnival and Popular Culture in the Caribbean, Gerard Aching. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. ISBN 0-8166-4018-1

The most enigmatic and arguably most memorable line in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is the concluding question, framed less as an interrogation than as a protean ambition: "Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" It is the unsolvable riddle, perplexing and pithily wrapped; it is yet another invitation to make definitive sense of—nay, solve—the Ellisonian dilemma about race, class, and social revolt in (post)modern America. The relationship between voice and agency, who "speaks" for whom and, inevitably, between black and white America, is dramatically unsettled by Ellison's allusive query. How can anyone be certain that they are not being spoken for on the lower frequencies since blacks such as Invisible Man can hear resistance—and complicity—enunciated in many registers, in many varied lyrical hues?

The multiple faces, or masks, more appropriately, of subaltern resistance is the focus of Gerard Aching's Masking and Power: Carnival and Popular Culture in the Caribbean. Aching's work is a critique that turns on the study of three literary texts from different "cultural" parts of the Caribbean, in which the mask constitutes the central motif: from the anglophone Trinidad and Tobago there is Earl Lovelace's The Dragon Can't Dance, from hispanophone prerevolutionary Cuba there is Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Tres tristes tigres, and from Martinique is Patrick Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnifique. It is not its choice of fiction, however (although these are all significant texts within their own cultural contexts, novels whose use of the mask gives them a particular standing within their various literary canons), from which Masking and Power derives its critical salience. The significance of Aching's project resides in his capacity, in a geographical area fraught with cultural divides that are primarily "linguistic" in character, to read the Caribbean as a single—and singular—region, a geopolitical entity bound together by cultural practices—especially the shared love of carnival and its politics, the variegated use of the mask from Port of Spain to Port-au-Prince. In a region where English, Spanish, French, and Dutch, to say nothing of languages such as Hindi or Arabic, function not only as linguistic markers of colonial origin but as absolute cultural borders, in a region where ideology has historically divided, in a region where cultural nationalists, from the various black power movements of the 1970s to Hindu nationalists in contemporary Trinidad, Aching identifies (without refuting the importance of regional difference) in and through the mask cultural common ground, a shared history of resistance to colonialism. Masking is the cultural practice that transcends ethnic, racial, or linguistic or European-derived boundaries.

What binds the Caribbean, and these three novels, is a shared propensity for the fictional and the actual carnivals to reveal what Aching labels "politics on a lower frequency": resistance by a dominated group without much access to power, that is subtle, underhanded, innovative, full of subterfuge and disguise; resistance that sometimes takes the form of "agreement" with or the "endorsement" of hegemony, or performing its subjugation for the ruling bloc while undermining domination through what Homi Bhabha has dubbed "sly civility." In the terms of Invisible Man's grandfather, this is political resistance through the art of "yes-sing them to death and destruction." The Ellisonian politics of interrogations, however, represents a modality that Masking and Power will not endorse. (Which is not to say that there is no desire to underwrite a cultural politics of resistance to the dominant order that is efficacious in its subversive oppositionality; Aching recognizes that such a politics is no longer viable or available in the fiction or in street practice itself.) Neither, however—and here Aching's reading is at its most subtle—does Masking and Power dismiss carnival as a site of political resistance. There is, instead, a novel-by...