Kingston Drummers playing a set at Tambufest 2023. Long Bay, Portland. (https://vimeo.com/1057151152/ff4b1bf83e; screenshot by TDR)
The Caribbean, as it happens, was central to the development of imperial and colonial knowledge about the body, not only during the early modern period of Spanish empire, but also at the height of mercantile capitalist imperialism throughout the British, French, and Dutch West Indies (see for example Gómez Reference Gómez2017; Hogarth Reference Hogarth2017, Reference Hogarth2021). However, it was not just European observers who were attempting to understand bodily processes in the tropics; this was also true of the Africans they trafficked to the New World. Science studies scholar Pablo Gómez has argued, for example, that the knowledge-building strategies of Black Caribbean ritual practitioners constituted an early elaboration of empiricism, in which their ways of knowing the body “catalyzed multiple intellectual, cultural, and material transformations in this region over the long seventeenth century” (2017:8). We often speak about “embodied knowledge” as if we are all agreed on what it means, and as though we are clear about the relations it brings into view, but we must imagine that now, as then, differently situated bodies know different kinds of things, that they carry different inheritances and ground different ideas of what it means to be a person.Footnote 1 Bodily knowledge matters because it has been integral not only to the elaboration and management of mercantile capitalist plantation-based monoculture and subsequently to liberal promises of inclusion and citizenship, but also to the refusal of dehumanizing ascriptions—as property, as non- or not-quite-human, as traffic-able, or as socially and politically dead (see Patterson Reference Patterson1982; Wynter Reference Wynter2003).
Kumina practitioner Bradley Thomas playing at a Tambufest event. January 2022, Bath, St. Thomas. (Photo courtesy of Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn)
I am interested in what the body can tell us about notions of sovereignty that are alternative to those tethered to these foundational frames of property, accumulation, and dispossession. And most importantly, I am interested in whether and how bodies in motion help us chart alternative terrains through which to radiate interiority and community. I want to explore the kinds of evidence that are evoked in and through the body by thinking through and with a kumina festival, “Tambufest,” that I have been coorganizing for the past five years with Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn (a percussionist who currently performs with The Lion King on Broadway), Nicholas “Rocky” Ferguson, and the St. Thomas Kumina Collective.
Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn and Nicholas “Rocky” Ferguson drumming at a Tambufest event. January 2022, Bath, St. Thomas. (Photo courtesy of Laurie Lambert)
Kumina, which emerged from the practices of indentured laborers who were brought to Jamaica from the Kongo region of Central Africa after the abolition of slavery in 1838, is one of the practices Sylvia Wynter (Reference Wynter1970) would have understood as heralding the “indigenization” of African descendants in the so-called New World. By this, she meant to draw attention to the processes through which Black people humanized the landscape of plantation-based slave production by peopling it with their gods and spirits, the practices that offered (and continue to offer) portals to worlds of temporal and bodily fluidity. In kumina, as in many diasporic ritual practices, the counterclockwise dancing, driven by drums and marked by singing, is meant to invite possession, or myal, a complex of being and knowing that heralds the negation of Black being, the return of ancestors, and a surrender to spirit.
In the world of kumina, progressive developmentalist teleologies are eschewed, binaries of body and soul are destabilized, and a conception of Africanness as “exponential” (Stewart Reference Stewart2005)—as encompassing both the particularities of ethnicity and a pan-Africanist sensibility—is advanced. What might these bodies in motion tell us about cosmologies that cannot be recuperated or resolved into Western ways of bodily knowing? What can they tell us about the forms of collective world-building that exist outside of but in relation to the juridical structures of sovereignty that govern modern Western political and social life?
The Body Reclaimed
Western political theory has been, as Shatema Threadcraft has put it, “profoundly somatophobic” (2016:208). For Descartes, the mind-soul was trapped in (and therefore inseparable from) the body, whose subordination to the mind-soul also organized other subordinations—of non-Europeans to Europeans, of women to men, of colonized to colonizers. Moreover, the body was to be transparently apprehended (and controlled) through reason; it was to be an object among all other objects. Throughout the period of conquest, imperialism, and the transatlantic slave trade, what this meant pragmatically was that Europeans were afforded an interiority and individuality, an internalization of the self. Their closed bodies were not subject to violations by others, nor to being breached by spirits, and this is what allowed for the flourishing of the mind. Black and Indigenous bodies, on the other hand, could never attain such interiority, their fleshiness being too penetrable. Many Indigenous South Americans, for example, perceived the body as “populated by extra-human intentionalities endowed with their own perspectives” (Viveiros de Castro Reference Viveiros de Castro1998:472), and therefore as continuously and actively constituted through the sharing of bodily substances. The Black body, too, was permeable not only to the whims of estate owners and managers but also to “the spiritual hosts that had animated it prior to its capture by the West and its philosophy” (Strongman Reference Strongman2019:4).Footnote 2 Porous Black bodies as property thus became fungible flesh (Hartman Reference Hartman1997; Spillers Reference Spillers1987), where dispossessed Indigenous peoples became carnal (Povinelli Reference Povinelli2006), both lacking the attribution of subjectivity that would have made them legible as persons to imperialist adventurers.Footnote 3
Cartesian dualisms have persisted across various philosophical lineages and developmentalist pragmatics. However, after poststructuralism, after feminist theory, after semiotics, and after performativity, attention to the body has generated a number of interventions that have moved us outside of these Eurocentric binaries.Footnote 4 The scholarly lineage regarding embodiment in which I am most interested here is the one that reaches toward an understanding of the relationships between the body and conceptualizations of personhood, both individually and communally, and this is a lineage that (within anthropology) begins with Marcel Mauss and extends through the work of contemporary phenomenologists. Mauss’s (1935) insights regarding embodied habitus—that the ways we move are neither physiologically nor individually determined—provided inroads to thinking about bodily capacity, and therefore bodily perspectivity, as historical and social. If Mauss taught us that the body is not natural and universal, then Maurice Merleau-Ponty ([Reference Merleau-Ponty1945] 1962), drawing from Edmund Husserl, taught us that it is perceptual, where perception is indeterminate and preobjective (though not precultural). Here, the body is not an object to be known by the mind, but is instead the very grounds for knowing, a source of subjectivity, where the mind becomes instead the site of objectification.Footnote 5 As Thomas Csordas has put it, “embodiment is the existential condition of possibility for culture and self” (1994:12), and gleaning insights into the latter require what he has called “somatic modes of attention,” which are “culturally elaborated ways of attending to and with one’s body in surroundings that include the embodied presence of others” (1993:138).
Phenomenologists, thus, see the body both as plurally constituted, as a relation—both physiological and social—among bodies (Turner Reference Turner and Thomas1994),Footnote 6 and as the site of “perceptual processes that end in objectification” (Csordas Reference Csordas and Thomas1994:7); it is thus medium and mode of intersubjectivity (Weiss Reference Weiss1999). Within this formulation, the body is not an isolated object but is actively engaged in world-making. As the essential condition of being in the world (Heidegger’s Da-sein), the entangled and emplaced relational body brings “History” and “Society” in dialog with the day-to-day embodied practices of individuals and communities.
While this lineage is compelling, it has also produced certain analytic problems. A body that is perceptual and that is part of making a world must be a body that properly exists for itself, not as “flesh” (Spillers Reference Spillers1987), not as property, not as the grounds for modernity, but as self-possessed interiority. Rizvana Bradley has argued that the limit of phenomenology is constituted through its refusal to “engage blackness as a serious theoretical problematic for ‘moving beyond’ the proper body” (2023:82). Bradley observes,
Black people […] do not properly have bodies, insofar as such “having” is in fact a linguistic concealment of a terrible claim: both to the presumptive ontic status of normative personhood and to the regimes of property and propriety to which the metaphysics of individuation are inextricably bound […] flesh constitutes the body’s very condition of (im)possibility.(87)
The body is, for Bradley, a “racial apparatus” (83) that renders Black bodily sovereignty impossible; it is an entity that only indexes the ongoing violences of racial modernity, the conditions of possibility for Euro-American interiority. Bradley goes on to argue that “flesh is before the body in that it is everywhere subject to the body as a racial machinery, violently placed at the disposal of those who would claim the body as property” (86). As a result, she states,
phenomenology cannot furnish the conceptual tools for apprehending either the “lived experience of the black” or the experiments in form which emerge from that experience, because black people have never had (which is to say, had the capacity to lay claim to) bodies in the sense presumed by phenomenology. (89)
In a way, this is an important claim that serves the purpose of unsettling what Bradley sees as overly celebratory anthropological investigations of corporeality that position bodies as “porous, affectable, malleable, or experimental” (82). However, for me, it is also an ahistorical claim, and one that might hold water only after racial terminology becomes tethered to civilizational hierarchies and notions of being human.
It is important to be attuned to alternative concepts of “bodiliness” (Turner Reference Turner and Thomas1994), to pay attention with our bodies to the bodies of others, and thus also to the coexistences and copresences that accompany these bodies (Beliso-De Jesús 2015; de la Cadena Reference de la Cadena2015). It is also important to be attuned to the ways these bodies not only reflect but generate modes of Being and Becoming that cannot be captured by the logics of the Western state form. These modes include the pluriverse (de la Cadena and Blaser Reference de la Cadena and Blaser2018; Escobar 2020; Stengers Reference Stengers2010), or the kinds of “anachoreography” Fahima Ife has proposed as a “recursive practice of refusal” (2021:ix). They are forms of collectivity that recognize non-Western conceptualizations of bodies and their relations—to each other, to ancestors, and to the “natural” world.Footnote 7
Analytically, this moves us out of the totalizing realms of colonial, poststructuralist, and Afro-pessimist discourse and toward an appreciation of indeterminacy, performance, and improvisation. It asks us to eschew universalisms, totalizations, and characterizations to instead situate our perspectivity in relation to concrete temporal and material contexts.Footnote 8 The enfleshment and sensual experience of the body have histories that also bleed into the present, and if we pay attention to the strategies elaborated by those bodies that have been subordinated and defined according to the logics of others, our analytic lens shifts from questions of objectification to questions of perception and potentiality.
Bodies Possessed
Possession has a juridical and legal etymology that emerges in intimate relationship to modern processes of conquest and imperialism, processes for which the English are arrivants, coming on the scene in the early 17th century, long after the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas divided the lands of non-Christians between Spain (Castile) and Portugal. Within a context in which the right to absolute and independent rule (imperium) was based in the right to possess and rule territory (dominium), the British had to promulgate new understandings of land ownership grounded in both Roman law and post-Reformation understandings of Genesis and Psalms that placed a premium on the actual, physical occupation and improvement of territory (terra incognita or terra nullius) (MacMillan Reference MacMillan2006). Territorial possession of lands thought to be “unimproved” thus paved the way to the evisceration of Indigenous claims to land, and to the recognition of English claims to sovereignty supranationally. These maneuvers were supported by emergent theories of property and ownership (by political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke) and by cartographic practices (by geographers such as John Dee). In this conceptual tracking, possession shares with sovereignty the violences of modern juridical orders and the institutions of the state.Footnote 9
There is a second sense of possession, however, that emerges from the realm of the spiritual, and this sense allows us some inroads into the modalities through which juridical dominium could be disturbed. In tracking this parallel etymology, anthropologist Brent Crosson has demonstrated that by the early modern period, possession not only applied to territorial dominion but also “to the inhabitation of humans by spirits or demons” (2019a:546). Given that attention to this kind of possession emerged at the same moment when post-Enlightenment political philosophy began to position the rational, “self-possessed,” individual as the proper subject of liberal governance, Crosson argues that spirit possession was foundational to Western modernity, insofar as it became a kind of “constitutive other” for Western personhood (see also Johnson Reference Johnson2011, Reference Johnson2014a, 2014b, 2019). Unsurprisingly, “possession” thus also came to be a key focus of study for anthropologists and other ethnographers who were interested in non-Western (and particularly African and African diasporic) spiritual practices.
If dispossession (of land, of oneself, of one’s “body-lands,” to quote Ana-Maurine Lara [Reference Lara2020]) constitutes nonpersonhood, then possession requires “spiritual and bodily reclamation and healing” (Cordis Reference Cordis2019:12). In this sense, possession is embodied practice, process, and dialog; it is ephemeral, performative, affective. It indexes that altered state of consciousness, time, and space caused by the inhabitation of humans by gods, spirits, and ancestors (both eventfully and in the everyday), the moments in which one is claimed by and in dialog with a network of spirits and co-presences (see Beliso-De Jesús 2015; Berry Reference Berry2021). It is an embodied phenomenon that can both produce and transform power through cultural memory and everyday performance, and by performance here I mean to invoke Diana Taylor’s notion of repertoire as a set of embodied practices that also constitutes a system of knowledge production and transmission (2003:26).Footnote 10 It thus marks the nonlinear and unexpected ways something that feels like relation (Glissant Reference Glissant1997) circulates and is transmitted from one to another, today, yesterday, and maybe tomorrow. This kind of possession reaches toward something that is processual, something that includes nonhumans in relational networks, something that reconstitutes colonial recognition (see for example Scott Reference Scott2002; Matory Reference Matory2018).
We are inclined to read ritual possession through the specter of the political, to understand it as a response to the exigencies or uncertainties of any given contemporary moment, or as a way to read the past, and not just one past, into the present.Footnote 11 In this sense, the ways that people “catch power,” which is how Brent Crosson describes the indeterminate relationships of agency obeah practitioners in Trinidad activate, also allow us to “question unitary conceptions of sovereignty in Western political theory” (2019b:609), seeing it instead as performative and distributed among “powers that exceed and inhabit human frames” (610; see also Crosson Reference Crosson2020). Roberto Strongman has similarly identified possession as a kind of transcorporeality specific to Afro-diasporic communities but reflective of broader African conceptualizations of personhood, in which the human soul is “multiple, removable, and external to the body that functions as its receptacle” (2019:2). The real tragedy of imperialism and slavery, Strongman argues, was thus not that it positioned Africans as primitive, backward, and soulless, but that its discourse of interiority closed off their “philosophical corporeal openness while at the same time legislatively prohibiting precisely those religious rituals of trance possession that render black bodies inhabited or soulful” (2019:4).
Ancestral possession, then, becomes a mode of redress and reclamation, what Nadia Ellis has called a structure of diasporic belonging:
One belongs, under a spirit’s possession, neither to oneself strictly, nor to any one particular moment or place in time. Rather, for an eternal moment, a moment during which nothing but paradox reigns, a subject may be both here and there; may be, or rather will of necessity be, at once in the current moment, wherein she can be perceived by others, and in another time altogether, perceived only minimally. She will be in place—perhaps spinning—but she will float above that place in a way that enables a perception of expansiveness and travel. She will give herself over to another power; and yet that other power will work with her, alongside her, so that she may feel differently empowered—possessed of knowledge and understanding that she does not usually own. (2015:147)
What is critical in this passage is Ellis’s attention to the “knowledge and understanding” that is gleaned through possession, and the way this leads to a different kind of possession, a sense of ownership that is not grounded in the property relations of liberal political philosophy. We might think of the empowerment Ellis indexes as a kind of attunement. In surrendering to the spirit, perception shifts, not only for the person in myal but for the community attending to that person, which requires attention to the temporal and spatial shifts created in and through myal, and to the needs and desires of specific ancestral presences.
Audience members at Tambufest 2023, Long Bay, Portland. (Photo courtesy of Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn)
Stephan Palmié, in his work with Afro-Cuban ritual practitioners, sees this attunement as emerging from the technology of divination, which he argues should be seen as “the record of the reflections of people on the moral texture of the world in which they conduct their daily business of being humans in the face of danger” (2002:76), and therefore as the elaboration of a science, a co-constituted body of knowledge that emerges from and within modernity. In Jamaica, we might identify this science as a “myal complex,” an African-based religious structure oriented toward healing and deliverance from the ontological degradations of slavery. Myal was identified (and feared) by planters as early as the 1760s (Long 1774) as a worldview that, in separating the body from the mind-soul, conceptualized individuals as possessing multiple souls, and understood the dead as part of the living world. In myal, ancestors appear to communicate with those inhabiting contemporary temporal terrain, and to catch myal is to serve as a medium for these ancestors. It is, by another name, possession; and myal thus marks the nonlinear and unexpected ways something that feels like relation circulates and is transmitted from one to another today, yesterday, and maybe tomorrow.
This “myal complex” encompasses the practice of kumina. Kumina, like other aspects of Jamaica’s “folk cultures,” has been mobilized by artists and other cultural workers as part of an anticolonial turn away from Eurocentric markers of cultural competence, and by nationalist states to inculcate people into an understanding of their cultural value within the context of new political arrangements (Thomas Reference Thomas2004). In this way, though it emerged in Jamaica as an instantiation of the elaboration of life outside the plantation system, kumina became a cornerstone of a nationalist sovereignty that imagined the state as the container for liberatory aspirations. Jamaica’s postindependence cultural policy for example, adopted in 1977, positioned African-Jamaican folk practices like kumina as expressions of cultural heritage that should be preserved through documentation, instruction, and performance within competitive logics of the National Festival of the Arts. While this has been crucial to a process of destigmatization, state recognition can also produce a sense of containment (Stewart Reference Stewart2005; Thomas Reference Thomas2004). Tambufest, on the other hand, emerges from our intention to create space for world-building outside of (but in relation to) the juridical structures of modern collectivity that were founded in settler colonialism, imperialism, and slavery. If myal is a science of attunement that produces the potentiality of “giving-on-and-with” others toward a relational, iterative practice of being, it is this potentiality that we are trying to produce with Tambufest.
Tambufest
Our intention with Tambufest is to create space for dignity, healing, and collectivity. It is a festival that is part community fun day, part discussion, and part performed ritual practice, and it is designed to bring people together in community to reflect on issues that affect their lives. In past years, we’ve facilitated moderated discussions about political violence, about prostate cancer and healing, and about the various forms of land dispossession that are afoot across Jamaica. Our intention with these discussions—or “reasonings,” as they are called in the Jamaican context—is to chart new futures, explicitly and unconsciously, through the portal of kumina and the relations it brings into being.
It is important to note that Tambufest is a space of performed ritual practice, which is to say that in showcasing kumina, among other Afro-Jamaican ritual traditions, we are not seeking to produce a mass myal event. Instead, we are curious whether it is possible to cooperatively activate the conditions for the relational space of myal, and if in that space, we can glean insights into how we learn to surrender to each other and to a different way of reckoning collective belonging and accountability. While it is true that one aspect of Tambufest has to do with attaching value and legitimacy to kumina and other practices within a context in which they are often either unknown or stigmatized, it is also true that the performance of ritual practice generates a sphere of improvisation and play. Here, I am invoking improvisation in the way Margaret Thompson Drewal (Reference Drewal1992) has written about Yoruba ritual, where it signals “moment-to-moment maneuvering based on acquired in-body techniques to achieve a particular effect and/or style of performance” (1992:7). For Drewal, “improvisation is transformational” (7) because it constitutes a creative and agential process of negotiation and argumentation, both within and among the performing groups and between these groups and their audiences, thereby destabilizing the idea that ritual is static, something to be preserved and protected.
There is also an aspect of Tambufest that might be understood as the protection of a heritage perceived to be endangered. Not as many practitioners know the “bongo language” as previously did, and there are songs that have fallen out of ceremonial rotation while others that, as one elder put it, “are not appropriate to this culture,” have been brought in. The eldest women who were keepers of the tradition have passed on, and practitioners worry about kumina becoming “watered down” without the strong leadership of elders and the strong interest of youth. “We don’t want it fi die out,” one practitioner explained. Continuity, thus, is a concern for practitioners, but again, this continuity is not defined by static modes of preservation. It is, instead, more akin to what Mary Louise Pratt has elaborated:
Continuity is defined not by the collective maintenance of practices, stories, and beliefs over time but by the shared work of world-making conducted by the group over time. Practices, stories, and beliefs play a fundamental role in this work, but they are not the work itself. (2022:9)
If, as practitioners say, kumina brings peace and healing, if it creates the conditions for relation, then its organization and presentation takes work. And this is not only the work of drumming, singing, dancing, playing the grater, or caring for people in myal, but it is also the work of preparation for the festival—building a stage, gathering food, contracting performers, hanging lights, renting porta-potties, hiring security guards and a master of ceremonies, arranging travel (for students, for performers), inviting those who will reason with us, and dealing with all the various things (both small and large) that go wrong before an event. Surrender is not spontaneous, but is effortful and intentional; it emerges out of already existing relations to expand the relational field. I want to provide a few “snapshots” of Tambufest in order to flesh out these positions.
2018
The first Tambufest was held at Lynval’s Lawn in Port Morant, St. Thomas in July 2018. Wedderburn asked Alain Van Achte, his colleague at The Lion King, to record and mix the sound so they could release a CD afterwards. Two of my graduate students, Leniqueca Welcome and Jake Nussbaum, were invited to come along to visually document the festival and to broadcast it live over internet radio, respectively. The four undergraduate students who had come to Jamaica with me that summer to conduct research on human rights and sexuality also traveled with us to St. Thomas. As Van Achte and Nussbaum were setting up the microphones, members of the kumina collective arrived. Early and Patrick sat down on the drums for a sound check, with Kiddie behind Early on the kata sticks. Fine Spear stood at the microphone as lead singer with Dwayne beside him, and Kerriann was on the other side dancing, next to Cornell.
When we were ready to start, the Kingston Drummers began their set, and those who had been milling around took seats. After their performance, we screened Four Days in May, an experimental documentary focused on the 2010 state of emergency in Kingston, Jamaica—locally dubbed the Tivoli “incursion”—during which at least 75 civilians were killed. Carol Lawes, Wedderburn’s longtime friend and “auntie,” moderated the discussion that followed the film. Being in St. Thomas rather than Kingston meant that not everyone fully understood the ins and outs of what had happened in 2010, but those who did spoke up about how partisan politics, and specific politicians, were the cause not only for moments of spectacular violence like the “incursion,” but also for the ongoing gang wars that plague downtown Kingston and beyond. After the discussion, the kumina began in earnest. Leniqueca positioned herself on the ground to the side of the circle. Wedderburn and John-I were finding places to store the extra electrical cables on the side of the venue. Van Achte was still adjusting the microphones, and Muggy was wandering around with another video camera. Ferguson began moving extra drums out of the way. Then Kiddie sat on the (ki)bandu, his sock foot damping the drum, and Patrick played the kata sticks behind him. Doma entered the frame dancing the circle; Kerriann, too, handed off the grater to someone else and started dancing in place. Fine Spear rose up to take over the lead singing of “Come wi just a come.” The man who was playing the shaker during the early sound check began dancing, as did a few women in one of the corners. He was attempting to engage them but they were not taking him on. Apple’s little boy positioned himself between her and the kyas drum; he stayed mostly still but took in the subtle rocking of his mother’s legs. It was early in the night, and the sweat hadn’t yet started to pour.
A little later, Leniqueca moved to a place where she could shoot over the back of the kyas drummer. Now Cornell was on the bandu and the energy was starting to heat up. Patrick was behind him playing the kata sticks, and also leading the song. People came to the side of the group and stood up, many filming with their own phones. Leniqueca moved again; now she was behind three women dancing, their bodies responding to the bandu, which Dwayne was by then playing. Kerriann was sweating through her denim jacket. I remember she wouldn’t take it off because she only had on a bandeau top underneath, and she didn’t want people staring. Eventually, Wedderburn gave her a T-shirt to wear with her long skirt. Later still, Early was drumming and Doma started to lead the song “Oh, Donna Oh” as a couple people poured from the bottle of rum that sits in front of the drummers. A woman crossed between Doma and Leniqueca’s camera. Her body quickened with the rhythm but she continued to sing. She quickened again, and then again. She picked up the rum and sprayed it from her mouth in the four directions. The playing continued, and she seemed to shake it off. The circle appeared to move inward; Early was intensifying the tempo until, with a flourish, towel in his mouth, he ended the song with a final break.
A while later, the vibe cooled out a little and Early directed his twin daughters to play the drums with him behind them on the kata sticks. They were maybe about 16, both wearing long-sleeved Neymar soccer jerseys over their skinny jeans, and both sporting sequined embroidered sneakers, one of which they each had to remove to begin to play. A crowd formed around them to watch. They were steady, slower, talking with each other across the drums. Doma, their mother, was singing. They marked the end of one song with the drums and began to get up, but someone in the crowd shouted, “Neymar, no, give us another”—using the name of the Brazilian soccer player on their jerseys. They started again. The twin on the bandu looked serious. At one point, her shoulders dipped, someone in the group shouted encouragement, and she offered an intense flourish, at the end of which she raised her head and smiled. She turned around to look at her father and seemed to ask if it would be OK for her to stop. He clearly said no, and she turned back around, smiling again, and continued to play. Now her body was less stoic. She was focused, unfazed by the many camera lights in her face, and responsive to her mother’s singing. A bit later she looked back again, as if to ask, “Now?” This time, the answer was yes. She smiled, looked up and said something to her mother, and within 20 seconds she wrapped it up. She and her sister quickly put their shoes back on as Aisha, the emcee for the evening, announced that the radio livestreaming had ended and the evening was over. Wedderburn, Alain, and I quickly debriefed, after which point they helped Van Achte dismantle the recording equipment before we all headed back to Kingston.
2019
I am waiting at the airport in Kingston to pick up two of the graduate students who have been most involved with the Center for Experimental Ethnography (CEE) and CAMRA at the University of Pennsylvania. CAMRA is the graduate student Collective for the Advancement of Multi-Modal Research Arts that serves graduate students across several of Penn’s 12 schools, and that also mentors undergraduate students interested in integrating film, or performance, or sound, or other forms of creative practice into the research they are conducting. Similarly, the CEE is a hub for faculty and graduate students who have a creative practice at the heart of their research process, and among its many mandates is to support a wide range of student and faculty initiatives. Farrah Rahaman, a graduate student in the Annenberg School, and Gordon Divine “Dee” Asaah, who has since received his PhD from the Graduate School of Education, were invited to travel down to help with documentation of Tambufest 2019. We were not the only ones documenting the festival, however. A Jamaican woman who is based in the US, and who had traveled to St. Thomas with the Kingston Drummers, had asked us whether it would be OK for her to film the evening. Because we realized we wouldn’t be able to control who was filming due to the ubiquity of cell phones, and because she wasn’t proposing to set up professional equipment with the intent to sell the recording, we decided to allow it.
The daughter of a good friend of a good friend, Joelle Powe, who was then a student at Bard College interested in anthropology and filmmaking, was also meeting us at the airport to drive to St. Thomas together. As we drove along the south coast toward Port Morant, Asaah, who is originally from Cameroon, kept marveling at the landscape. “The red dirt,” he said, “looks just like home.” “The roads,” he continued, “just like home.” The goats, the fruit trees, the people, “just like home.” His father had passed on the year before, and he had been unable to travel for the funeral, so he was looking forward to hearing the drums, which, he later also said, sounded “just like home.”
When we arrived at Lynval’s Lawn, the finishing touches were being placed around the stage. The stage itself was an innovation from the previous year, a result of complaints by the dancers that because attendees were congregating around the drums, they were unable to complete the circle around them. Indeed, Wedderburn, Ferguson and other members of the collective felt that the 2018 iteration had been a bit “chaotic,” in part because we had not anticipated how different housing kumina in a public venue would be from holding a ceremony in more conventional spaces like house yards, where participants would be attuned to the structures guiding their engagement in the ceremony, and where the focus of the kumina circle would not allow for the constitution of an “audience,” per se. Because we had set up chairs at Lynval’s Lawn, we created the conditions for “audience” in “front” of the drummers, and because we had hung a screen on which to project the film—a screen we didn’t have time to strike before the kumina began—we created a “backstage” of sorts. People congregated in that backstage, which prevented dancers from moving counterclockwise around the drums, which meant that we lost the kumina circle, as well as the energy that is created by and through the movement in the circle. Without the circle, the body cannot become boundless. Building a stage, therefore, served the purpose of mitigating the risk of unwanted incursions into the ceremonial space, and it allowed for the free movement of the dancers. In 2019, too, we decided to give Lifetime Achievement Awards to elders who had maintained the practice over many years, and who had supported younger practitioners. Elders are living archives—of languages, lineages, and songs—but they don’t always attend ceremonies; for some, this is because they feel kumina has changed too much from what it was “first time.” Our stealth mission with the awards was thus to encourage them to come to the festival, so that younger ones could learn from them and their presence. That year, we recognized Virgil “Manzie” Ellis and Miss Ivy Stewart with plaques and a small amount of money.
Nicholas “Rocky” Ferguson with Jah T, Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn, and Deborah A. Thomas bestowing Lifetime Achievement Awards on “Torch,” “Fine Spear,” and “Cha Cha Ben.” Tambufest 2022, Long Bay, Portland. (Photo courtesy of Laurie Lambert)
The evening proceeded much the same as it had in 2018, though this time without the film. Vendors who had heard about Tambufest 2018 came and set up tables. Someone Rocky knew from St. Thomas (whom Wedderburn also later realized he knew from New York) was present and wanted to be involved, so we invited him to pour libations to open the event. He was followed by a poet, and then Rocky, Wedderburn, and I gathered onstage to speak about the history and importance of kumina, and about our roles in relation to Tambufest. The Kingston Drummers played a set, we took a short break to set up the kumina circle, and then the kumina began.
Later that evening, because of noise that was intensifying in front of the entrance to the pavilion at Lynval’s Lawn, Wedderburn and a couple friends went outside to see what was happening. They came to realize that people had set up gambling tables, among other activities, and that a fight was breaking out and had turned into a big commotion. We didn’t have any security outside, and this was concerning not only in terms of our ability to maintain the safety of those participating in Tambufest, but also in terms of the energy we were trying to produce with the festival. These kinds of behaviors and activities ran counter to the way we were seeking to build community. After the kumina ended, I drove Joelle back to Kingston; Wedderburn, Rocky, and everyone else packed up the recording equipment, dismantled the stage, and then Wedderburn took Rahaman, Asaah, and Van Achte to a hotel in Portland, since we had planned to do a screening and discussion of Four Days in May, followed by more kumina, a couple days later on the beach in the community of Prospect, Port Antonio, Portland.
Wedderburn, Ferguson, and I had planned to hire someone to edit the footage Rahaman and Asaah (and Joelle) were shooting so that we could create a couple of promo reels for the festival. However, after Tambufest ended, Rahaman said she wanted to take a stab, and developed video clips, like the one this QR code and url link to: https://vimeo.com/503426541.
Members of Kingston Drummers performing at Tambufest 2022. Long Bay, Portland. (Photo courtesy of Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn)
There are many things to notice about Rahaman’s editing decisions here. First, the clip captures the energy of a community event, one that features a practice with which attendees are likely familiar even though they may not be directly involved, but in which they nevertheless took part since it was what was going on in one of the main gathering places in the area on a Saturday night. Notably, the clip is also doubly mediated. By this, I mean that while our students are shooting, they are also capturing people in the audience who are themselves recording. This is characteristic not only of our moment, but of the ways Caribbean people participate in Black public spheres across diasporic locations (see Thompson Reference Thompson2015). And finally, as a dancer myself, I love that when V and Apple are seated on the edge of the stage when Patrick begins singing, you can see the kernel of what the movement will become even as they are resting, and that what propels them to rise up is that this kernel grows and grows until sitting can no longer accommodate it. We would later use this clip in fundraising efforts.
Members of the Kaya Jonkonnu group performing at Tambufest 2022. Long Bay, Portland. (Photo courtesy of Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn)
2022
In the hopes that we could provide a monetary foundation for Tambufest 2022, we set up a GoFundMe campaign during the spring, which raised a little over US$5,000, money that went primarily to the performers (and their transportation). That year the rest of the costs came out of pockets—our own.Footnote 12 Because of the experiences we had in 2019 at Lynval’s Lawn, Wedderburn and Rocky had started thinking about other potential venues for the festival, venues where we would have more control over who was coming in and out, and where we could be relatively assured of the safety of performers and guests. During the early spring of 2021, Wedderburn and Laurie had decamped to Jamaica to spend the remaining months of Covid insecurity there. Later in the fall, Bradley, Rocky, and others got a job to play a kumina in the community of Arcadia, St. Thomas, where Manzie is from. On Wedderburn’s way to that ceremony, he stopped to visit Mark Cover, who had opened a seaside spot in Long Bay called Cover’s Bar and Grill just before the pandemic began. Wedderburn had known Cover before from when they had co-organized (with another friend, Silas) a Drum Festival at Folly in Port Antonio in 2009, where Kingston Drummers performed alongside other kumina groups. As Wedderburn and Cover were talking, they came up with the idea that it would be nice to host an evening of drumming, to bless the place and to invite people back. Wedderburn continued on to Arcadia and discussed this with the drummers, and they set a date for early 2022. When the evening of the event arrived, people came from the community (a few tourists even showed up), and everyone ate, drank, and joined the circle of dance. When Wedderburn and Rocky talked about it afterwards, they decided to move Tambufest to Cover’s Bar and Grill.
Charles Town Maroon Drummers and Dancers. Tambufest 2023, Long Bay, Portland. (https://vimeo.com/1057156076/45d5baabee; screenshot by TDR)
The seaside venue is beautiful, but farther to travel for the St. Thomas people. And that year, they had torn up the roads all the way from Kingston to St. Thomas going one way, and from Port Antonio to St. Thomas going the other. Travel was slow going (and dust saturated) for everyone during the construction, which meant we were worried about attendance since we knew people would intend to come, and then decide not to brave the roads. The festival itself grew to include a few additional drumming collectives and community cultural groups: the Kaya Jonkonnu group from Port Maria, the Charles Town Maroon Drummers, Lynval’s African Descendants, and the Manchioneal Cultural Group. The latter, a group that focuses on the Afro-Jamaican dance performance traditions of bruckins and dinki mini, is only a short distance from Long Bay. We also invited Devon Taylor (who directs JABBEM, the Jamaica Birthright Beach Movement) and Miss Cynthia Lodge (who led the fight against the corporate development of Winnifred Beach) to talk about access to public beaches. During the festival itself, this discussion was particularly robust, in part because the issues regarding public access to beaches are especially important in that section of eastern Jamaica.
Because Cover’s is a fully outdoor venue, there was much more to be done in terms of building the stage, renting tents, chairs, and porta-potties, building a kitchen, hiring security guards, finding places for people to stay, and managing the various moving parts. Because I had a group of undergraduate students in Jamaica as part of a different project, I was out of commission for the last week and a half of planning and coordinating for Tambufest. On top of that, my own family had also arrived—my son had been enlisted to assist the videographer, Courtney Panton—and I was juggling them alongside my class. Rocky also was out because he contracted Covid when he went to Sumfest, the reggae festival, after finishing his med school exams for the year. This meant that Wedderburn bore the brunt of all the final logistics like transporting the sound equipment to the venue, buying the materials for and overseeing the construction of the stage, setting up the lighting, hiring and facilitating the videographer, and dealing with all the decorations. By the day of the festival, we were both broke, he was exhausted, and I was burnt out from coordinating the students’ activities and processing their experiences. Despite the fact that the perennial issue with the stage manifested again—this time, because everybody wanted to be on it—the festival went off more or less smoothly. However, it wasn’t until the kumina at the end of the night that I was able to be fully present.
Members of the Manchioneal Cultural Group performing a dinki mini. Tambufest 2022, Long Bay, Portland. (Photo courtesy of Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn)
A beautiful moment caught my eye, and thankfully it was also recorded. Members of the kumina collective were onstage, mostly with their backs toward the “audience” since their focus was inward on the drums. Dwayne was on the bandu, and Manzie and Fine Spear were singing. Apple was dancing in front with her son, who was maybe six or seven at the time. They were facing each other at the beginning of the clip, circling around each other. Apple was holding her skirt and her son stopped dancing to ask her a question (the microphone almost picked it up, but not quite). Apple never stopped moving, and she didn’t specifically answer his question, but then as her son heard the drum break, he was right back into the movement. She approached him and retreated, leaned forward and back. He moved backward and circled himself. Then she approached, arms outstretched, and he approached too. She encouraged him to follow her lead to dip to one side, then to the other—they almost touched but didn’t really. He jerked his head to one side and faced away from her, then turned back around and assumed the normative posture of the dance, hips forward and pelvis moving circularly, shoulders and elbows back, feet flat and inching forward (insofar as this is possible in sneakers). They both broke with the drum and then suddenly they were in perfect unison, circling around themselves to the left, right elbow up, with the exact same effort quality, at the exact same pace, and in the exact same place in their kinespheres. They were clearly being moved by the same spirit, which created a unison of unbounded bodies in time.
Apple was teaching her son how to tune in, how to feel the spirit through dance. She was teaching him to surrender—to the drums, to the spectral presences being called by the drums—and she was clearly enjoying it. Her son was not always completely smooth in his movements, but he always knew when the break was coming, and his body marked it with certainty. And while Apple didn’t verbally answer the question he had for her earlier, his demonstration of sensory perception and attunement indicated that he assimilated the lesson she was actually giving him, through her body.
Members of the Manchioneal Cultural Group performing a bruckins dance. Tambufest 2022, Long Bay, Portland. (Photo courtesy of Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn)
Bodily Surrender
The intentions behind Tambufest, as with other community-based spaces of care, creativity, and spirituality, are to promote reflection and joy, to think from circularity rather than linearity, to create channels for accountability to each other, and to transparently engage with our histories and our future, at one and the same time. Throughout the long night of the festival, dancers surrender to the drums, drummers surrender to the ancestors, some audience members surrender to sleep, and others join the circle of dance, moving collectively in and toward a relational, iterative practice of being and belonging. By bringing together representatives of different kumina groups, the St. Thomas Kumina Collective attempts to refuse divisions among practitioners that had been unwittingly (though perhaps inevitably) introduced by nationalist institutions like the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission through the competitive logics of the National Festival of the Arts program. And by tapping into transnational networks of practitioners and promotors, Tambufest constitutes one iteration of a broader multiscalar complex of traditional and popular cultural production through which we try to engage the violences of modern political formations in order to imagine alternative futures.
Members of the Islington Cultural Group relaxing before their performance. Tambufest 2023, Long Bay, Portland. (Photo courtesy of Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn)
Our aim, in brief, is to tap into that space of memory, that inheritance, that knows that the body—individually and collectively—is unbounded. If Tambufest is a living, community space that celebrates and honors the past, present, and future resources of the community, then it is also a way to practice an attunement to each other’s kinespheres, a kind of radical sovereignty, something Laura Harjo (Reference Harjo2019) defines as a set of everyday, community-based practices through which people recognize their own power to act and to self-determine, a multimodal and multispatial sphere of energy, relationality, and decolonial love that creates the conditions to bring into being a futurity that isn’t enclosed in the infrastructures of governance or management, or museums or universities.
What I want to argue is that we are heir not only to colonial logics, but also to the means to refuse or retool them, and that both of these inheritances are inscribed in and on the body.
I want to position bodily surrender (to myal, to each other) as evidence of knowledge transfer and community building in which the body—individually, collectively, and ancestrally—is limitless. It is this limitlessness, this unboundedness, that can dismantle Western juridical conceptualizations of possession and sovereignty. At the same time, bodily unboundedness generates a range of vulnerabilities that demand a perceptual attunement, also embodied, in the service of ongoing cooperative praxis. There is rigor to developing the kind of bodily attunement that creates the conditions for surrender, that allows one to intuit the drum break, to know when to spin and with what quality, to align oneself with the flow of spirit. It takes work, as well, to coordinate the collective building of stages, hiring of porta-potties, corralling of performers, organizing of food and transport, and all the other forms of labor that create the conditions for us to come together in relation. It takes work to surrender, just as it takes work to release ourselves from the structures of imperialism and colonization, and this work is necessarily ongoing and durational.
