tyresias | Other's words to the forefront

Snipet from a disabled manifesto:

We reject the idea that institutions must be created to “care” for us, and proclaim that these institutions have been used to “manage” us in ways that non-disabled people are not expected to accept. We particularly denounce institutions whose purpose is to punish us for being disabled, or to confine us for the convenience of others.
We reject the notion that we need “experts,” to tell us how to live, especially experts from the able-bodied world. We are not diagnoses in need of a cure or cases to be closed. We are human, with human dreams and ambitions.
-John R. Woodward

Originally, creoles were, of course, white Europeans born in the colonies, or those Europeans who had lived so long in the colonial setting, that they acquired many “native” characteristics and were thought by their European peers to have forgotten how to be “proper” Englishmen and Frenchmen. Shortly thereafter, the term cam also to be applied to black slaves.

The distinction in any 18^th-century plantation document listing the slaves employed on an estate or owner by a particular slaveholder marked the distinction between “Africans” and “creoles”; and much hung on it in terms of how well “seasoned” to local conditions the slave was, how far already acclimatized to the harsh circumstances and rituals of plantation life. “Africans” were slaves who were born in Africa and transported to the colonies; “creoles” were slaves born in, and thus “native to,” the island or territory. The essential distinction is between those from cultures imported from elsewhere and those rooted or grounded in the vernacular local space.

Originally, the term “creole” in the Caribbean context had both a white and a black referent. It was applied to both native-born white and black populations, and only subsequently did it acquire the more specific, contemporary meaning of “racial mixing” – or as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “the result of inter-cohabitation between the two ‘races.’” It was never historically, and is not today, fully fixed racially. […]

Writers like Édouard Glissant use the term “creole” in a boarder sense, to describe the entanglement – or what he calls the “relation” between – different cultures forced into cohabitation in the colonial context. Creolization in this context refers to the processes of “cultural and linguistic mixing” which arise from the entanglement of different cultures in the same indigenous space or location, primarily in the context of slavery, colonization, and the plantation societies characteristic of the Caribbean and parts of Spanish America and Southeast Asia.

[Caribbean cultures] are all, also, in different ways what I would call translated societies – subject to the “logic” of cultural translation. Translation always bears the traces of the original, but in such a way that the original is impossible to restore. Indeed, “translation” is suspicious of the language of the return to origins and originary roots as narrative of culture … Translation is an important way of thinking about creolization, because it always retains the trace of those elements which resist translation, which remain left-over, so to speak, in lack of excess, and which constantly then return to trouble any effort to achieve total cultural closure. No translation achieves total equivalence, without trace or remainder. […]

So there are also, always, within créolité, the recurring tropes of transplantation and forced labor, of mastery and subordination, the subjugations of plantation life and the daily humiliations of the colony; as well as the whole range of survival strategies – mimicry, signifyin’, vernacularization, substitution of one term by another, the underground, subversive, rhymthmic “rereading” of an overground, dominant harmonics … “Language,” George Lamming [in The Sovereignty of the Imagination] recently reflected, “is a source of control. Language is also a source of invention.” […]

Omeros, despite its classical connotations, is not written in the pentameter, but deliberately departs from it, adopting – and adapting freely – instead, the terza rima from the model of Dante’s Divine Comedy: Dante, a master in his own time of the vernacular, who is also, to our surprise, quoted admiringly by a very different kind of poet – Edward Kamau Brathwaite (it all beings with Dante Alighieri…”). Musing on the question of language in the largest since, Walcott has written, in his poem A Far Cry from Africa:

I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?

[Rastafarianism is] a cultural phenomenon which insists on tracing everything back to its ancestral African roots, and which does want to make the return journey. The return journey is not only, for Rastafarians, the essence of their spiritual and political “program”; their world view is predicated on the myth of the redemptive return. This is one of most profound mythic structures of the New World. One cannot understand the culture of the plantation Americas – before and after Emancipation – without the redemptive promise of a return to the Promised Land: though it is translated as “Africa” and the released from the bondage of slavery in Babylon by Rastafarians, whereas it symbolized the escape from servitude and Freedom to the enslaved, who often found its promise in borrowed, translated, Christian language of the only book slaves were encouraged to read – The Bible. In fact, the one may well have been modeled on the other in the mythic imagination. Both have deployed this idea as a vehicle for expressing the resistance to bondage, “suffering,” and the profound hope for Freedom and liberation. The same idea is at the center of Garveyism, which had a significant relationship to the emergence of Rastafarianism in the early years of the 20^th century.

[…] The Rastafarian version is predicated on a notion of “roots,” whereas creolization deploys the logic of “routes.” From within the imperative of the Rastafarian or an Afrocentrict world view, creolization is a disaster, because it weakens by an intolerable “mixing” or hybridity the purity of faith and “tribe,” and the commitment to a redemptive return.

The essence of returning to Africa is condensed, for Rastafarians, in their belief in the divinity of Haile Selassie, the former ruler of Ethiopia and, at the time, emperor of the first independent black African state. Selassie is revered as Ja – the Lion of Judah, King of Kings. Selassie was an important symbolic figure for a Pan-African perspective, sine he was the king of the only independent black society on the continent – Ethiopia. Of course, people of African descent in the Caribbean came from many places in Africa, especially on the west coast of the continent. The one place they didn’t come from was Ethiopia! There are instructive stories about Rastafarians who in the ‘70s did actually attempt to return to Ethiopia, and who had a hard time being either recognized or accepted by the Ethiopian people. This is not to deny that Ethiopia has an important symbolic function in Pan-Africanism and in the re-identification with Africa, and a significant religious impact on Jamaican society, especially in the form of a variety of Ethiopian and Coptic-based churches and sects. Many sacred African texts have been absorbed into the Rastafarian belief system. But the sacred book, their most sacred source of interpretation (or as they would put it, “reasoning”), is the Bible, originally introduced to Christianize the slaves by European missionaries, which the Rastafarians have wholly appropriated by the textual strategy of inversion – reading the Bible backwards, against the grain; reading it upside down, reading it according to an alternative code ; translating it metaphorically from its meaning as the story of God’s Chosen People (the Jews) to the story of the enslavement and the dreams of freedom of Ja’s “chosen tribes,” and their long servitude in the “Babylon” of slavery and colonialism.

-Stuart Hall