Theorizing a Colonial Caribbean-Atlantic Imaginary

Sugar and Obeah

Keith Sandiford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136853982
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book develops a theory of a Caribbean-Atlantic imaginary by exploring the ways two colonial texts represent the consciousnesses of Amerindians, Africans, and Europeans at two crucial points marking respectively the origins and demise of slavocratic systems in the West Indies. Focusing on Richard Ligon's History of Barbados (1657) and Matthew 'Monk' Lewis' Journal of a West India Proprietor (1834), the study identifies specific myths and belief systems surrounding sugar and obeah as each of these came to stand for concepts of order and counterorder, and to figure the material and symbolic power of masters and slaves respectively. Rooting the imaginary in indigenous Caribbean myths, the study adopts the pre-Columbian origins of the imaginary ascribed by Wilson Harris to a cross cultural bridge or arc, and derives the mythic origins for the centrality of sugar in the imaginary's constitution from Kamau Brathwaite. The book's central organizing principle is an oppositional one, grounded on the order/counterorder binary model of the imaginary formulated by the philosopher-social theorist Cornelius Castoriadis. The study breaks new ground by reading Ligon's History and Lewis' Journal through the lens of the slaves' imaginaries of hidden knowledge. By redefining Lewis' subjectivity through his poem's most potent counterordering symbol, the demon-king, this book advances recent scholarly interest in Jamaica's legendary Three Fingered Jack.

1
The Imaginary as a Poetics of Theory and Crosscultural Consciousness

As a concept, the imaginary is at once familiar and transcendent, universal and utopian. Its familiarity may be marked in the common actions and practices of a given group. Its transcendence may be perceived in the way it so commonly resists definition, and in the way, when defined, it still mystifies and veils its origins. We encounter the word so often in the discourses of academic and popular culture today that, like culture itself, or fantasy, or the imagination (sometimes a cognate but not a synonym), it has naturalized our assumptions about the object(s) it names. In a deeply philosophical work of cultural theory on the Caribbean, Edouard Glissant distinguishes the imaginary from the category of illusion, endowing it with the aesthetic and poetic power to produce a people’s identity and their being in the world.¹ To this his translator Betsy Wing aggregates her understanding that for Glissant the imaginary is “all the ways a culture has of perceiving and conceiving of the world.”² That gloss distils the imaginary’s meaning down to a reductive generality. Terse yet totally inclusive, the summation envisions the universal. And yet, with Glissant, as with other theorists, the matter can become so abstract, so complex and elusive as to embody the definition of utopian. The formulations I present in this book will not revolutionize the idea; they will shed some new light on it, as it is introduced into the prism of the mythic, the occult and the uncanny that are the intrinsic properties of the Caribbean Atlantic to be recovered in Ligon and Lewis. My approach is exploratory and eclectic, privileging the processual and the dynamic over the fixed and the instituted. The imaginary will remain a complex notion, but the texts and contexts to which I apply the notion illustrate its profound organicism and significations across the cultural practices and structures of the colonial societies under scrutiny.

In what follows next, I want to sketch the conceptual contours of the imaginary, account for its sources, outline the respects in which my crituque derives and diverges from some key theorists, and acknowledge the limitations and restrictions the scope of this project necessarily places upon it. In this book I define the imaginary as a model for the collective mentalities of a particular group of people in which are reflected the archives of their cultural knowledge, the repository from which they draw their shared values, their symbolic meanings and their common beliefs. The imaginary is at once self-creative and creating: it possesses an autopoietic power to create reality, to determine what we typically call cultural values and social norms, as well as to constitute human persons in the specific ordering relations that link them to origins, animate their consciousness of their place in the world, and of their relations with others. The self-creating power of the imaginary consists in its capacity to bring into being and sustain the prevailing values and symbols of a society; its creating power consists in its capacity to produce and shape individuals who can imagine and experience themselves as agents in myth and history, and elaborate narratives, oral or scribal, that reflect the epistemic and pragmatic conditions of their ability to institute knowledge, invent objects, and evolve practices. The autopoietic and the creating, mythic consciousness and historical experience, the epistemic and the pragmatic define persistent binarist modalities or flows in which the imaginary lives and moves, though these binaries may sometimes be perceived as conflictive or oppositional. These distinctive binary factors mark my indebtedness to Cornelius Castoriadis, an intellectual with affiliations to both social theory and economic theory. In his Imaginary Institution of Society, Castoriadis ascribes clearly defined place and meanings to the inherent symbolic workings of society, as well to the “embodied” or concrete forms in which that imaginary becomes expressed in institutions, behaviour, practices, and objects.³ Castoriadis assigns this set of symbolic and objective factors to the category of “the social imaginary.” Including the definite article in a label for this category repeats Castoriadis’ usage, and captures the unique meaning and historical specificity he attaches to the concept. He establishes pointedly that he means to stress the concept’s relevance and application to specific crises or challenges that occur within “a particular epoch or a particular society,”⁴ requiring a specific imaginary within which to articulate their meaning and create the ideas or imaginings for their resolution. I find this specificity especially attractive for the particular epoch defined by the Ligon–Lewis axis in this book and the particular society of slave plantation culture they represented. The context of crisis is also suggestive for my interpretation of the way the paradigm of sugar and obeah shaped the slavocrats’ imaginary. That nexus reflects a moment of crisis represented in certain colonialist literary discourses as a cure/disease dichotomy. It is appropriate to foreground here the observation that one finds this ascription (both in medicinal and mythic terms) of curative properties to sugar in Ligon, among other early colonial publicists. I discussed some meanings and implications of this in my Cultural Politics (2000). The process of elaborating a sharp juxtaposition that appears in the sugar-as-cure/obeah-as-disease dichotomy seems to have quickened and crystallized as social and economic crises engendered fear in the minds of power elites in England and the colonies. On the one hand, it illustrates the workings of the social imaginary as the slavocrats attempted to fetishize sugar in a defensive posture designed to preserve the politically instituted order of their racialized society. On the other, it illustrates the slaves’ use of obeah as a “a new set of significations” designed to disrupt that order with a “radical social imaginary” of instituting counterorders.⁵ Using that dramatic confrontation of those two myths, those two orders, we can factor out these fundamental assumptions from Castoriadis’ thought that are critical to our understanding of the concept farther on: the imaginary is a “unifying factor that provides a signified content and weaves it with a society’s symbolic structures.”⁶ In the slavocrats’ use of sugar and the slaves’ use of obeah we perceive the imaginary’s functional capacity to motivate social agents “to see in a thing what it is not, to see it other than it is.”⁷ This is the very definition of the way imaginaries create meaning; it emphasizes my preference for factoring out of the abstractions that persist in Castoriadis’ ideology the concrete agency of individuals and human groups, to translate imaginaries into shared discourses, social practices, living institutions. For the political struggle of slaves in a revolutionizing nineteenth-century Caribbean, freedom would have been a practical instituting realization of the imaginary. My reading here is considerably assisted by the exegetical analysis and reinterpretations Claudia Strauss undertakes to illuminate Castoriadis for applied anthropology. For Strauss, Castoriadis’ social imaginaries may be “the conceptions of many members of a social group—or sometimes dominant members of a social group, or ideologists of a social group—repeated in multiple or influential social contexts, learned from participation in shared social practices and exposure to shared discourses and symbols.”⁸

Although Jacques Lacan ranks high in the catalogue of theorists who have defined concepts of the imaginary, his deep grounding in the psychoanalysis of individual fantasy makes him less useful for the kind of social and group relations I want to explore in this book. In his Ecrits (2–7)⁹ Lacan defines “the Imaginary” as that order which the child enters after losing “the Real” (the state of nature); with this movement the child feels a greater need to make the other a part of the self. For my project I extend this idea to cover individuals and communities in analogous phases of transition. Lacan’s focus on the individual psyche and individual subjectivity may suggest some utility for probing the Demon-king as an ego in pursuit of a fantasy of power. His theory of how subjectivities are constituted from shared social relations or from a desire for the other offers a solid grounding for my definition of Lewis as an intersubjective consciousness.¹⁰ I derive my definition of Lewis’ intersubjectivity in large measure from the way he immerses himself in slave practices, from the way obeah compelled his imagination, and from the ways African Nancy stories transformed the unconscious of his Journal.¹¹ Here, though, I move to acknowledge some further limitations which are inherent to the Lacanian concept of the imaginary and some others which I have imposed to match this book’s objectives. For Lacan the imaginary is tied deterministically to the child’s preverbal stages of development and therefore describes a realm that must be transcended. For this book’s imaginary, that aspect of Lacanian theory does not take sufficient account of the epistemic power to shape ideology and to create alternative social structures.

Without further deferral, I want to establish that the latter restrictions have been imposed by the deliberate privilege I assign in this book to selected Caribbean-Atlantic theorists and intellectuals. In defining that priority I am more concerned with excavating an imaginary that reveals a persistent and coherent “system of relation.” Glissant defines this concept as the unique principle of Caribbean identity and culture that reveals a persistent and coherent “system of relation.”¹² As I use it in this book, the system of relation locates the Caribbean Atlantic imaginary in pre-Columbian origins. That source furnishes a logical foundation for the way the book connects the imaginary to indigenous consciousness. Fixing that nexus as a node in a larger flow opens the way to link the imaginary conceptually to the crosscultural terms of Brathwaite’s and Harris’ poetics. For Brathwaite the crosscultural imaginary of the Caribbean is founded on a myth of origins involving the oceanic and the terrestrial. Brathwaite’s vision is of a generative act in which the primordial elements of Atlantic energy are spurted out of the ocean and follow a sea route, arcing and landing to take root as blooming islands. In the poet’s dynamic myth of productivity,

The islands roared into green plantations
ruled by silver sugar cane
sweat and profit
cutlass profit
islands ruled by sugar cane.¹³

This collusion of routes and roots recurs in what Brathwaite terms a “tidalectic” pattern, a ceaseless experiencing of consciousness in space and time, of fragmentation and creolization, from a Middle passage of loss “farward” to repeated rituals of reconstituting selves and recovering the spaces of culture. The image of an old lady Brathwaite saw daily sweeping the environs of her dwelling on the north coast of Jamaica permanently evokes and sharpens the meaning of those processes. Her action appeared to him “like the movement of the ocean,” like our ancestral grandmother’s “coming from one continent / continuum, touching another, and then receding (‘reading’) from the island(s) into the perhaps creative chaos of the(ir) future.”¹⁴ Brathwaite recounts watching this figure perform this same action repeatedly over time, and not fully understanding its meaning until one day he saw her afresh:

body silhouetting against the
sparkling light that hits the
Caribbean at that early dawn
and it seems as if her feet,
which all along I thought were
walking on the sand … were
really … walking on the wa
ter … and she was tra
velling across that middlepass
age, constantly coming from h
ere she had come from—in her
case Africa—to this spot in
North Coast Jamaica where she
now lives …¹⁵

Where Glissant imagines this aspect of the imaginary as an expression of symbolic memory, Brathwaite invokes identical metaphors but contextualizes them within the dailiness of customary habits. Foundational to his myth of origins is the axiom that the sea gave birth to the islands, and the islands’ people derived their unity from their historical dependence on the sea. As a poet, Brathwaite exploits the figural values of the sea as a medium for migratory passages; as a historian he develops a theory about how those watery passages creolized the cultural identities of Caribbean people. As a theorist, he often invents ideas that distil the higher order meaning-making resources of both practices. Explicitly differentiated against the linearity of the Hegelian dialectic, his theory of tidalectics reprises the cyclic nature of Caribbean ontology. He illustrates the theory with the specifically historicized images of a Caribbean-Atlantic female figure, ocean water and terrestrial soil. The old Jamaican woman’s ceaseless travelling motions that continually bridge the sea–land divide as she mythically imagines her unbroken link to the past time and place of Africa. With the succinct power of a fresh insight Brathwaite contracts the meaning of all this into the aphorism “the unity is submarine.”¹⁶ After serial experiments with different ways of interpreting this scene, I am now able to deduce from it the predicates for a poetics that reads the intuitive and the submerged as key sites of the imaginary, and the woman’s repeated sweeping motions as arcs and circles that trope the signs of union and return in the submergence plot of the Isle of Devils.

Whether associated with the figure of an arc or the figure of a bridge, the metaphor of crossing is a richly suggestive one that allows for interanimation rather than radical displacement. In Wilson Harris the imaginary is perceived to originate in a pre-Columbian rainbow arc, a figural bridge, linking the Caribbean to Mexico and the Guianas.¹⁷ For Harris crossculturalism is a system of relations that affirms dynamism over stasis and envisions Caribbean space as a complex ever-changing landscape.¹⁸ The dynamics and consequences of this system constitute the crosscultural poetics I invoke in this book, namely, that poetics is the legitimating conceptual framework for the arc that links sugar to the ocean. Conceived as a form of tropic energy, this crosscultural poetics of interpretation authorizes the rationale for pairing Ligon and Lewis, for comparing their positionings in history and in Anglophone Caribbean colonial discourse. Briefly noted here, the arcing structure emphasizes a relationship of crossing rather than unbridgeable isolation between Ligon’s History and Lewis’ Journal. The concept of an arc bridges the apparent discontinuities of time, place and politics that ostensibly separate Ligon and Lewis. The tropic energies of Brathwaite’s tidalectics and Glissant’s poetics of relation support my critical vision of the unconscious alignment existing between Ligon’s reactionary politics and Lewis’ revolutionary vision.

Though the thematic content and metaphoric structures differ in degree from the Brathwaite to the Harris references, both major Caribbean cultural theorists invest the Caribbean Atlantic with resonances of spatial magnitude and naturalize its power to create and situate human and nonhuman subjects in meaningful relationships to myth and history. Drawn from nature and revalorized in those authors’ poetic imaginations, those ideas shape a new set of methodological implications for my system of relation. At least two persistent patterns, one spatial, the other bodily, suggest significant figural values. What they suggest are certain intricate permutations of triples (ocean-sea-water; Earth-land-sugar) and doubles (sugar-ocean) within this system of relationships that figure the Caribbean-Atlantic’s capacity to generate complex tropes. For example, these effects are manifested in the way the fluids or flows of ocean water “turn” or metamorphose into solid terrestrial bodies. They appear further in the way the natural organic forms of islands and canes “turn” or are transformed respectively into a territorialized entity and a consumer commodity. Together they came to constitute very powerful forms of symbolic capital for colonial powers.

In Walcott, too, sugar cane yields this symbolic capital, but he assigns its imaginary benefits to the slaves. For him sugar embodies the power to contain and reproduce the imaginary because in the canefields the memory of African slaves is immanent and inerasable.¹⁹ Walcott leaves the relationship mystifying. I take memory and immanence to be two indivisible elements in my theory of the imaginary’s constitution. For this theory the imaginary is realized on the diurnal scene of labour itself, from the flows of sweat and blood which fertilize the very consumable body of sugar. In Walcott’s commonly cited poetic figure, “the sea is history,” Caribbean consciousness and identity meet in an oceanic space of cosmic community. If the submerged state of drowned slaves renders them susceptible to oblivion in common minds, the history of the survivors lives on in the routes and passages they traversed via an ocean that is “the vast expanse that culture has to cross” to find terrestrial habitations.²⁰ The voice of the modal “has to,” used in the preceding quote, responds to the historical imp...

Table of contents

• Routledge Research in Atlantic Studies
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Imaginary as a Poetics of Theory and Crosscultural Consciousness
• 2 Sugar and the Ocean
• 3 Ligon: Atlantic Crossroads, Imaginary Prospects in the History
• 4 Ligon: Sugar and the Myth of Cure
• 5 Lewis: The Imaginary of Counterorders in the Journal
• 6 Lewis: Obeah and the Myth of Disease
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index