Along with rum, suntans, and errant Carnival Cruise ships, masquerades are now an essential part of the Caribbean brand in the stereotypes of globalized culture. Without denying the rum or the fun (or the enormous importance of tourism in local economies), sober academics also mine masquerading traditions for cultural data, particularly processes of Creolization that define every Caribbean culture. Robert Nicholls has written a cultural history of masquerading in the Eastern Caribbean, especially the English-speaking Leeward Islands, analyzing European and African traditions that have been transformed into this unique expression of West Indian culture.
Nicholls's book is both parochial and audaciously broad based, reflecting the trajectory of its author's career. While his research and point of view are rooted in the Virgin Islands, where he teaches at the University of the Virgin Islands, Nicholls is also a black Atlanticist with an arts degree from London, where he studied with Taiwo Jegede. He has also conducted field research on masquerade cultures of the Igede people of Benue State in Nigeria. From these vantage points, he reproposes a classic question in Caribbean scholarship: what old world elements were adopted by Afro-Creole masquerades and how did transmission occur? Further defining his field of interest, Nicholls describes masquerade as a multivoiced gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) that combines all the other arts: music, dance, visual decoration, performance, into ‘whole theatre’ or, as West Indians define it, ‘play’ – an African-derived concept which combines both entertainment and ritual.
The best documented of these Afro-Creole masquerades is the cross-dressing ‘Mocko Jumbie’ who perambulates carnival on his high stilts throughout the Caribbean (I have seen him towering over laughing tourists and locals in communist Havana Vieja and consumer capitalist Charlotte Amalie). Described as a ‘supernatural scarecrow’, Jumbie is an etymological cousin of the ubiquitous ‘duppie’, an ancestral figure from the ‘Bush of Ghosts’ who shares nominal roots with ‘zombie’ via the Kimbundu nzambi, and possibly with ‘Mumbo Jumbo’, defined by eminent Carnivalista Dan Crowley as a ‘magician who protects his people’. Don't worry if these variant etymologies seem conflicting, because they are. Almost every feature of West Indian culture is ‘overdetermined’ as that term was used by Freud to describe multiple sources for a single image. ‘Overdetermination’ renders the search for masquerade origins both exhilarating and oft times risible. When Nicholls suggested Estonian or Norwegian analogs for some Leeward Masquerade, my eyes roll. Flipping through his chapters on European and West African sources for Caribbean masquerade, one senses a long shadow from The Golden Bough (which Levi-Strauss once described as ‘that immense monument to futility’).
Parallel evolution, practical expediency, and cultural diffusion are all advanced by Nicholls as possible modes of transmission (though, interestingly, ‘syncretism’ is never mentioned – is Herskovits's classic theory now defunct?). What emerges is a pragmatic ‘sliding scale of Creolism … exploration of the provenance of the mocko jumbie shows it to be derived from Upper Guinea counterparts as modified by the Igbo and other Africans, with few apparent European stimuli … in contrast, the Maypole, quadrille and hero-combat mummers play are closer to the European end …’.
Perhaps the most delightful of these Caribbean ‘syncretisms’ is the ‘Shakespeare Mas’ of Carriacou, the Grenadine Island famous for its Afro-inclusive Big Drum ceremonies. The ability to recite Shakespeare is much admired in the anglophone Black Atlantic, but Carriacou elevates appreciation of that skill to new heights on Shrove Tuesday, as reported by Joan Fayer and Joan McMurray, ‘when groups of men compete both verbally and physically in their recitations of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar’. Poor and inaccurate recitations result in a whipping by the opponent and a challenge by another player. Signifiers are combined in the ‘Shakespeare Mas’ where literary text, verbal combat, costumes, and dance intersect to create a Caribbean Creole artifact. This conjunction of Caesar's mighty lines and black Atlantic verbal dueling results in a new art form, let's call it ‘Shakespearean Rap’, a witty parody which might well have pleased another ironist, T. S. Eliot, who wrote, ‘O that Shakespearean rag, so elegant, so intelligent.’
Besieged by evangelical Christians and inundated by hordes from Carnival Cruise, the future of Caribbean carnival may not be bright. So Nicholls ends his survey with this impassioned appeal from Willard John, director of the troupe ‘Guardians of Culture Mocko Jumbie’, who opines, ‘the best way to preserve culture is to live it’.
