Rebel Dance, Renegade Stance: Timba Music and Black Identity in Cuba

6. Around the Iroko Tree: Fieldwork in Cuba

chapter 6 Around the Iroko Tree: Fieldwork in Cuba My success as an ethnographer necessitated a continued negotiation of role expectations based on my light pigmentation, my femaleness, my middle class status, and my American citizenship. —faye harrison (1990, 98) In the photograph that opens this chapter, I walk with several other people around an iroko—la ceiba or silk cotton tree—located near the main cathedral in one of the oldest parts of La Habana Vieja. The ritual happens every year on November 16 in honor of Agayú, who is syncretized as San Cristóbal de La Habana, and entails a small coin offering at the foot of the tree and making seven rounds of it while touching the trunk ‹rmly. Agayú is the ever-burning ‹re at the center of the earth and the cracks (volcanoes) that allow this type of energy to surface; it is a portal between worlds. Agayú is said to carry people across great divides and obstacles (Edwards and Mason 1985, 49). For Cubans and other Caribbean people, the iroko symbolizes a link with the ancestors and things African.1 One can only imagine how many millions of souls have circled the ceiba. They retrace the steps of the ancestors and prepare ground for future generations. Their palms press against the bark: the spiritual home base and source of vital force (aché). This ritual is analogous to my ‹eldwork experience. In the very act of taking to the ‹eld, I retraced the steps of many anthropologists who did so before me—from Lewis H. Morgan, Bronislaw Malinowski, Robert Lowie, Alfred Kroeber, Margaret Mead, St. Clair Drake, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude Lévi-Strauss, to Clifford Geertz and John Langston Gwaltney— using their tools, now refashioned, to do ethnography, part of the work of representing culture. That is to humbly enter a community, interact and learn through participant-observation, actively wait to understand, or in Franz Boas’s words “come to terms” with a given culture, and run away from and into myself. Melville Herskovits, Lorenzo Turner, William Bascom, Fernando 135 Ortiz, Lydia Cabrera, Pierre Verger, Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, Sydney Mintz, Robert Farris Thompson, and others traveled along the Atlantic continuum as researchers before me. As an African (American) on the path, seeking to establish an academic voice, I was accompanied especially by Dunham, Hurston, and Primus. Just as “hot rhythm” and “cool science” battled for possession of Dunham and Primus who used their ‹eldwork as raw material for dance creations , they also vied for Hurston whose meticulously collected folklore became the metaphors, allegories, and performances in her novels (Hurston 1990b, 294). This combination of art and social science continues through me as I perform ethnography and envision the diaspora through the lens of my camera. In the photograph of the ceiba, a man looks off into the distance, perhaps at those next to perform the rite, for on this day people arrive constantly and wait in line. All that he sees is connected to the tree and to the ancestors through his hand and his very gaze. My own eyes stare into the camera. My presence represents a present (now) that links the past and future to Africa. African Americans and Cubans are family, connected to each other by what we have of Africa within us, and by our 136 rebel dance, renegade stance 19. Iroko, 2002. similar, often interconnected histories. My gaze marks the ethnographic moment; the time I spent in Havana and have recounted in this volume. My gait has the seriousness of the new initiate, not the swagger of the adventurer. I have come to honor and comprehend something of the connection between black U.S. Americans and black Cubans. I agree with Pearl Primus that honesty and love are the most essential ingredients of any successful approach to ‹eldwork. About her ‹eldwork experience in Africa, Primus writes: I am fortunate to be able to salvage the still existent gems of dance before they, too, fade into general decadence. In many places I have started movements to make the dance again important. Ancient costumes were dragged out, old men and women—toothless but beautiful with age— came forth to show me the dances which will die with them. (Martin 1963, 185) She expresses the sad heaviness of ethnographic ‹eldwork—a “rescue” enterprise of missionary zeal and valiant, yet hopeless, effort, since everything, even culture...