Cultural Conundrums: Gender, Race, Nation, and the Making of Caribbean Cultural Politics

3. The Dystopic Popular: Jamaica's Dancehall

99 3 . T H E D Y S T O P I C P O P U L A R Jamaica’s Dancehall I see these islands and I feel to bawl “area of darkness” with V. S. Nightfall. —Derek Walcott, “The Spoiler’s Return,” Collected Poems When edouard glissant yearns for a new Carnival aesthetic to emerge out of the ossi‹ed tourist spectacles that Martinique ’s pre-Lenten festival has become,1 the reader senses that Glissant would approve of the symbolic economies at work in the Bournehills masquerade presented in Paule Marshall’s 1969 novel The Chosen Place, The Timeless People.2 This community’s annual reenactment of the Cuffee Ned slave rebellion is universally recognized by critics as the street drama through which the repressed history of black resistance ‹nds its actualization and apotheosis.3 By utilizing the Carnival ritual of play as the medium to stage a narrative of autochthonous heroism and renewal, the poor, marginalized citizens of Bournehills are able to voice that which would be inaudible in any other context. In a novel obsessed with the recovery and restoration of an Afro-centered history, it is their play of the “awesome sound” (282) of planter Percy Bryam’s ambush and murder at the hands of Cuffee Ned that allows the Bournehills masqueraders access to their repressed history. The Bournehills masque is not the only depiction of Carnival masquerade that Marshall’s novel presents to us. Equally elaborate, but certainly less decipherable, is the Carnival costume of a young “prostitute ,” the former girlfriend of the novel’s folk hero, Vere Walkes, through whose eyes we survey her masque. She was in the middle of trying on a costume she would wear in the parade of bands tomorrow. It was an elaborate ball gown with sil- ver dust sprinkled over the layers of pink tulle that made up the long skirt, and sequins glinting bright and iridescent on the sleeveless low-cut blouse. Paste jewels glittered at her throat, her ears, on her stringy arms and all through the towering blond wig she wore over her coarse snuff-colored hair. And the strong red to her skin which Vere suddenly remembered, seeing her close-up, used to come surging dark and powerful to her face when they made love and she cried out and came beneath him, had been obliterated by a heavy stark-white pancake makeup that looked like grease paint. (271–72) Though an ephemeral ‹gure throughout the text, Vere’s girlfriend (she has no other name) is enmeshed, like her Carnival costume, in a tangle of pathological reference. Bournehills residents remember her as one of the “red people” from the neighboring Canterbury community , “cross-bred and worthless”: “They might has a little color and think themselves better than us because of it, but they ain’t got personality ” (31). As Vere’s love interest, she was the bene‹ciary of the romantic attention of a worthy and honorable man, but she betrayed him by “murdering” his “nice boy child” because “it was too black” (32). As evidence of her racial confusion and the psychic dysfunctionality that is thought to come along with it, she “sports” and “styles” in town with “can-can petticoat and wristwatch” (31). For Merle Kibona, the novel’s moral center and the girl’s only sympathetic observer, nothing about the young woman can be mediated apart from the psychosocial drama of inbreeding and self-contempt. Watching her working the bar at Sugar’s, where she solicits white tourists and sailors for prostitution, Merle recites for her foreign guests the already known details of the girl’s social history: “She’s from a place called Canterbury . . . Everyone up there has the same name and looks the same. We call them Backras, meaning more white than black and as poor as the devil. This one had a nice boy liking her, but when he went to America on the labor scheme she turned wild. She wouldn’t even take care of the child she had for him and it died” (85). In his ‹nal, wordless confrontation with her, Vere Walkes surveys the “white mime face” (272) of his ex-lover’s Carnival persona, searching for meaning but ‹nding none that can circumvent the pathologies already marked by the confused identities of her 100 CULTURAL CONUNDRUMS “Backra” status. Seen through his eyes, the girl’s Carnival masque masks nothing...