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Dancing the Nation An Introduction PATRICK TAYLOR What’s your nation? Arada . . . Cromanti . . . Yarraba . . . Moko . . . ? I’m a visitor, a tourist, just someone here for the day. —Paule Marshall, Praisesong for the Widow (Marshall 1984: 167) I also, the ‘thinker,’ dance my dance . . . the thinker is a means of prolonging further the terrestrial dance, and in so far is one of the masters of ceremony of existence. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Joyful Wisdom (Nietzsche 1960: 89) In Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, Papa Legba beckons the sterile imaginary of a homogenized middle class to open itself to the world in an ancestral dance into the future. Trickster, guardian of the crossroads, hermeneutical principle par excellence, Legba inaugurates the Haitian Vodou ceremonies and opens the gates between the profane and the sacred. Marshall’s Legba invites the widowed Avey Johnson to a Big Drum or Nation Dance Ceremony in Carriacou in the Grenadines. She is transported back to her youth in the Shouters Church in Tatem Island, South Carolina: “And for the first time since she was a girl, she felt the threads, that myriad of shiny, silken, brightly colored threads (like the kind used in embroidery) which were thin to the point of invisibility yet as strong as the ropes at Coney Island . . . she used to feel them streaming out of everyone there to enter her, making her part of what seemed a far-reaching, wide-ranging confraternity” (Marshall 1984: 249). Marshall’s heroine, Avey Johnson, is a modern American tourist traveling to the Caribbean who finds herself in a dance of black modernity (see Gilroy 1993). Her strange Caribbean cruise provides a way for Marshall the novelist, who is of Barbadian parentage, to assert a diasporic claim to a Caribbean homeland. Modernity devoid of ancestry is the production of the solipsistic ego, rationality without faith, life without meaning. It is living religious traditions and their implications for Caribbean modernity that are the subject of the essays in this book. To dance the nation is to find oneself immersed in a liminal world where tradition informs contemporary experience and ritual takes on new meaning. In the words of Rex Nettleford, Jamaican dancer, choreographer, and cultural theorist , dance is “part of a society’s ancestral and existential reality”; it is “one of the most effective means of communication, revealing many profound truths about complex social forces operative in a society groping toward both material and 2 Patrick Taylor spiritual betterment” (Nettleford 1993: 97–98). Anthropologically speaking, the Nation Dance is an Eastern Caribbean ancestral ceremony in which a community of people pay their respects to their ancestors and retrieve from them the knowledge of the past that will sustain the present and the future: the Nation Dance is an ancestral redemption of the present for the salvation of the future. A legacy of different West African cultures, similar ceremonies can be found throughout the Caribbean region—in the Kumina ceremony of Jamaica, for example, or in the reclamation rite in Haitian Vodou. One very noteworthy aspect of the Nation Dance is its multi-ethnic complexity. If a shared identity is the premise of an individual’s incorporation into a group, difference is the play of individuality that forever keeps identity in flux. Whereas identity is a site of unity, difference is the place of tension. The Nation Dance of Carriacou is in fact a ceremony in which the traditions of different dispersed nations are celebrated together in one sacred space, but in sequence, one after the other, each receiving its due: the Ibo, Cromanti, Congo, Arada, Moko, and others. African steps make way for European as the drums welcome the Old Creole nation. The Nation Dance is international (see Taylor 1996, McDaniel 1998: 18). Edward Kamau Brathwaite makes an appeal to this meaning of “nation” in its international sense when he refers to the languages of African Caribbean peoples as “nation language” (Brathwaite 1984: 2). This “dancing of nations” is very typical of the wider Caribbean religious experience . In West African thought, the spiritual world is linked to the physical, and religion is an ever changing symbolic arena in which new spiritual forces reveal themselves as the world changes. If God is a guarantor of meaning, meaning is contextualized and experienced in a multiplicity of evolving divine, ancestral , and spiritual forces. When different peoples come into contact with each other, their differing spiritual forces enter into relationships. The trauma of capture , enslavement, and transshipment intensified contact between Africans of different...

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