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16 Phantom Pain n athaniel Mackey’s Bedouin Hornbook There has been much lost in a frica. a s in the case of a lost loved one, the loss is neither to be accepted, rejected, or simply compensated for. The loss of traditional value reveals the madness of that which the tradition promised, i.e., the circumvention of loss—what tradition must promise but which no tradition can deliver. t radition’s loss propels those who valued it into resigning themselves to the impossibility of a coherent universe.1 in contemporary fictional texts such as o ctavia Butler’s Kindred, Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale, ishmael r eed’s Flight to Canada, a lice Walker’s Meridian, and n athaniel Mackey’s Bedouin Hornbook, the historical fact of slavery is associated explicitly or implicitly with constraints on the freedom of the contemporary a frican a merican artist as well as the artist ’s relation to a syncretic tradition. a mputation and castration, conflated in memory’s trace as ritual punishment for runaway slaves and other “bad niggers,” powerfully suggest, in Mackey’s Bedouin Hornbook, both the heroism and the psychic danger of the black artist’s radical individuality. With its insistent yet gracefully improvisational reclamation of the fragmented, dispersed , and syncretic elements of black diaspora aesthetic traditions, Mackey ’s novel plumbs the “ontology of loss.” it is the textual equivalent of ed Love’s evocative Vodou Loa sculptures made of shiny chrome auto bumpers salvaged from junkyards and dedicated to a frican a merican jazz musicians. Mackey’s novel also shares similarities with Mel edwards’ series of “Lynch Fragments,” which are sculptures that pointedly resemble wall trophies at the same time they ironically comment on a tradition of sculpture that celebrates the phallic object. edwards’ densely compact metal assemblages serve as tragic and dreadful emblems of threatened black masculinity. Their harsh, burnished strength and aesthetic potency belie the vulnerability and fear that sustain the construct of masculine sexuality and dominance. Composed of assorted hardware—scrap metal welded to links of chain, railroad spikes, knives, scissors, and other blades or bladelike objects—these broken tools allude to the exploitation of black male workers as, in e llison’s words, “the machines inside the machine,” and to the historical fact of literal as well as symbolic castration. 156 Chapter 16 That a careless word can kill or maim is a primary consideration of r ichard Wright’s Black Boy, in which the narrator is schooled by kindred and enemies alike to adopt a properly submissive verbal restraint or risk destruction . The accumulated images of castration/amputation in Bedouin Hornbook are related to the persistent association of a frican a mericans with both coerced silence and strategic inarticulateness, although what Mackey investigates is the relative stress placed on either articulation or disarticulation as oppositional values within and between cultures. The discursive representation of the a frican as alogos in Western culture becomes, for Mackey, the background for a series of meditations on music, myth, mastery, and masculinity . Just as the individual who seeks to distinguish himself through literacy from the “voiceless” mass learns the value of secrecy and indirection, like Wright’s black boy, and his prototype, the ex-slave Frederick d ouglass, so also the need, within traditional black communities, to shroud a frican spirituality in secrecy has contributed to the elusiveness, evasiveness, and enigmatic quality of a frican cultural practices in regard to a Western context of misunderstanding, oppression, and often deliberate distortion. [t ]he various elements of religious life in Brazil have shown varying degrees of resistance to change or oblivion. The rites have held out much more tenaciously than the myths. o f course, just because we know little about a certain area, we cannot conclude that certain elements in a religious complex do not exist. a t present few a fro-Brazilian myths are known to us, but this does not necessarily mean that there are none. . . . o ur lack of knowledge may . . . have something to do with the law of secrecy. a ll ethnographers who have studied candomble life have been struck by the important function of “the secret” in protecting the cult against the whites. The priests are reluctant to explain the profound meaning of rites, even public ones, to people inspired only by curiosity. They are afraid that this knowledge might be used against them or ridiculed as “superstition.”2 This defensive adaptation, born of the need to insulate a fro...

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