Obeah and Other Powers

The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5124-5

Contents

Foreword ERNA BRODBER……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………ixAcknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………xiiiIntroduction MAARIT FORDE & DIANA PATON……………………………………………………………………………………………………11 An (Un)natural Mystic in the Air: Images of Obeah in Caribbean Song KENNETH BILBY…………………………………………………………….452 “Eh! eh! Bomba, hen! hen!”: Making Sense of a Vodou Chant ALASDAIR PETTINGER…………………………………………………………………803 On Swelling: Slavery, Social Science, and Medicine in the Nineteenth Century ALEJANDRA BRONFMAN………………………………………………..1034 Atis Rezistans: Gede and the Art of Vagabondaj KATHERINE SMITH……………………………………………………………………………..1215 Slave Poison/Slave Medicine: The Persistence of Obeah in Early Nineteenth-Century Martinique JOHN SAVAGE………………………………………..1496 The Trials of Inspector Thomas: Policing and Ethnography in Jamaica DIANA PATON………………………………………………………………1727 The Moral Economy of Spiritual Work: Money and Rituals in Trinidad and Tobago MAARIT FORDE…………………………………………………….1988 The Open Secrets of Solares ELIZABETH COOPER……………………………………………………………………………………………..2209 Rites of Power and Rumors of Race: The Circulation of Supernatural Knowledge in the Greater Caribbean, 1890–1940 LARA PUTNAM…………………24310 The Vodou State and the Protestant Nation: Haiti in the Long Twentieth Century KAREN RICHMAN………………………………………………….26811 The Moral Economy of Brujeri under the Modern Colony: A Pirated Modernity? RAQUEL ROMBERG…………………………………………………….288Afterword. Other Powers: Tylor’s Principle, Father Williams’s Temptations, and the Power of Banality STEPHAN PALMIÉ……………………………316Contributors……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………341Index………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….345

Chapter One

An (Un)natural Mystic in the Air: Images of Obeah in Caribbean Song KENNETH BILBY

As one who has worked as an anthropologist and ethnomusicologist in a range of different Caribbean locations, I have long been aware that there is considerable disagreement about what the term “obeah” might mean. Such disagreements about meaning, in my view, tell us something fundamental about the nature of cultural experience in the colonized and still decolonizing societies of the Caribbean. Obeah, whatever else it might be, remains a primary site of cultural contestation in many of these societies. Because the semantic domain of this term almost always overlaps with spiritual concepts that have profound existential significance—and because, in the minds of those who speak it, the term almost invariably remains associated with an ancestral African past—it occupies a particularly prominent and highly charged place in this zone of cultural contestation. One way to get at the complex tangle of meanings surrounding an ideologically charged term such as “obeah” is to carry out indepth ethnographic interviews with individuals for whom the term is, in fact, richly endowed with meanings, including spiritual practitioners themselves, as I have done on many occasions over the years. Another way is to listen in on conversations that take place in vernacular or popular culture, which I have also done. The two sources of data, in fact, are complementary; each can be used to shed light on the other. Unlike most of my previous work on the topic, the present chapter focuses on the latter—the imagery of obeah purveyed through vernacular cultural expressions in various parts of the Caribbean.

Some idea of just how profound the existential implications of the term may be can be gleaned from the words of a prominent Ndyuka Maroon living in the Netherlands, himself a practitioner of spiritual arts, who characterizes obeah (which he spells “obiya”) as “an all-encompassing, all-pervasive and all-inspiring force.” “This spiritual force,” he adds, “is present in all modes of being.” Viewed through this Surinamese Maroon lens, obeah would seem to be quite similar to concepts such as ache (or ashe) in Cuban Santería and ase in the Yoruba religion—a kind of life force or energy that permeates the universe, which can be tapped and used in concentrated form by knowledgeable human beings. And indeed, this force sounds not altogether different from Bob Marley’s “natural mystic blowing through the air,” to cite one of the reggae icon’s most revered songs.

Marley himself was no stranger to obeah. According to his biographers, he came from a spiritually gifted line. Many today regard him not only as a prophet, but also as one of the most spiritually powerful people who ever lived—what in the language of Surinamese Maroon spiritual practitioners might be called “a great obeah man.” But to characterize Robert Nesta Marley, the world’s most famous exponent of the Rastafarian faith, as an obeah man would not sit well with most of those who now share the faith he helped to spread around the world. A typical attitude to obeah is revealed in the response of one Jamaican Rasta woman when asked by a naive North American visitor her thoughts on obeah. Bursting into peals of laughter, the woman replied, “You’re asking a Rastafarian about obeah? Well, the most I can tell you is by giving you a simile. Bob Marley said in one of his songs, ‘I am a duppy conqueror.’ We don’t really pay the duppy [spirit] world any mind. The practice of obeah is to use the spirits of iniquity to perform works. And, of course, you know that there can be no good in that as far as we can see.” “We just scoff at it,” the Rasta woman continued. “We refuse to be afraid of it, so people realize that our power must be much greater. We know we shall win because we are confident that good wins over evil.” Here, the same term used by a well-respected Surinamese Maroon spiritual healer to index “an all-encompassing, all-pervasive and all-inspiring force” serves as a label for working with “the spirits of iniquity,” a practice that is portrayed as the very embodiment of wickedness in a cosmic struggle of good against evil.

In a recent song by a young Jamaican reggae artist who calls himself I Maroon, obeah is represented as a source of confusion. But unlike I Maroon and many of his Rastafarian colleagues, who tend to view this confusion as something inherent to the practice and nature of obeah itself, I see this as a type of historically derived cultural confusion caused by the production over time of several layers of contradictory and competing meanings that continue to inhabit the same cultural space. This particular example of cultural confusion revolving around the term “obeah,” I would argue, is one of the more enduring and tenacious legacies of colonialism in the Anglophone Caribbean.

The only societies in the region that seem to have escaped this confusion are those constructed beyond the European colonial orbit, such as the Maroon peoples of Suriname and French Guiana. And this may change soon, depending on the outcome of the ideological battles now being waged by Christian missionaries and evangelists in the various Maroon territories. For the moment, most Maroons in this part of the world continue to use the term “obia” in overwhelmingly positive ways. For them, in addition to its several other positive senses, the term still refers to the all-pervasive spiritual power referenced by the Surinamese Maroon practitioner quoted above, which in practice is tapped primarily for healing, spiritual protection, and addressing the problems of daily life. Guianese Maroons see the knowledge of how to work with this healing and protecting obia as a precious gift handed down from their ancestors.

Elsewhere in the Caribbean, as I have argued in a number of other writings, obeah is most often publicly represented in largely or entirely negative terms, as a form of sorcery or malevolent witchcraft, even though there is widespread acknowledgment in more private contexts that the spiritual powers to which it refers are—perhaps in the majority of cases—sought out and employed for positive ends, such as healing and inducing good fortune. The cultural ambivalence that goes hand in hand with these contradictory ideas and images lends itself to the scapegoating of anyone thought to be an obeah practitioner, including those healers, herbalists, and other benevolent ritual specialists who identify themselves, or are identified by their patients or clients, as obeah men or women. (The blame for all the harm and suffering supposedly caused by the negative use of spiritual power tends to be placed on obeah men or women rather than those among their clients who, motivated by jealousy, envy, and greed—according to popular belief—pay them to abuse their powers to harm others.) This current cultural confusion is clearly the product of a historical process of colonization and cultural domination that has led, in most parts of the Caribbean, to the reduction of all forms of African religiosity and spirituality in public discourse to inherently antisocial sorcery or witchcraft meant to harm fellow human beings.

Many spiritual practitioners in Jamaica—to take one particularly important theater in what I would characterize as an ongoing ideological war over representations of African spirituality in the Caribbean—reveal through their words some awareness of the process of cultural domination that has fundamentally shaped the often-contradictory world of meanings within which they must operate. As one man, a longtime practitioner of the Afro-Jamaican religion known as Convince or Bongo, recently told me, “The name ‘obeah,’ it no sound good in the English. But the work from it, it a pretty fine work…. We no rate it fe go out deh [in public], go seh [the word] ‘obeah.’ We just say it local [i.e., among ourselves].” Implicit in this statement is a recognition that in the Jamaican context, part of what makes the word “unspeakable” is its perceived Africanness, which renders it problematic when inserted into the dominant colonial language; in private, however, where the “goodness” of the English that one speaks is not an issue, the word can still be used to refer to something that is “pretty fine.”

As this chapter (and others in this book) will show, the term “obeah” has been constructed in a variety of ways in different contexts, and therefore should not be seen as having any single, essential meaning. This of course makes it problematic to argue that any of these meanings is more correct than any other; all of them may be properly understood as historical products of particular social and cultural processes. But from the perspective of Guianese Maroons or the Jamaican Convince practitioner quoted above—or, indeed, many other people in the Caribbean—the notion that obeah or obia is a kind of spiritual power that is both African and “pretty fine” is correct; and the widespread coexisting idea that it is a kind of inherently antisocial, malicious witchcraft or sorcery is a misrepresentation. These dissenters from the dominant view may have a good point. The fact that there are still many voices making such assertions suggests that the ideological war over representations of African spirituality in the Caribbean, which began during the period of colonization and slavery, has yet to end. Indeed, its dissonances, I would contend, can still be heard—though often in muted, subtextual forms—in the popular music of the region.

OBEAH, ARTISTS, AND ANCESTRAL POWER

One of the richest forms of popular cultural expression throughout the Caribbean is music. In much of the region, topical songs offer one of the best and most effective means of gauging public sentiment and teasing broadly shared cultural understandings out of the cacophony of contentious public discourse. The topic of obeah is no exception. We can gain insight into the complex polysemy of this term not only from song lyrics, but also from certain other forms of expression associated with popular music, such as naming practices. Several artists and groups are known by stage names that include the word “obeah.” Why would popular musicians—some of them Rastafarians—name themselves with a term that is generally thought to denote an inherently evil form of spiritual power used to cause suffering and destroy innocent human beings?

In an interview published in the 1990s, the revered Trinidadian session guitarist Lynn Taitt told of how he had once played in a band called Obeah—adding, without further explanation, that this “is a bad word in Trinidad.” A few years ago, I asked Taitt why he had told the earlier interviewer that “obeah” was considered a bad word in his homeland. He suggested that it was because it is something that deals with “witches and spirits” and was used to “put hex” on people. When I pressed him on why anyone would name a band after such a destructive thing, he said, “You could use it both ways, you could use it for good or evil.”

If one reads between the lines, it is easy to see that the choice of Obeah (or Obeah Man) as a moniker in popular culture most often represents a kind of indirect or unspoken cultural revindication—a gesture toward reclaiming ancestral power through music or other African-related forms of cultural expression, and in some cases an attempt to reassert control over the language used to characterize such ancestral power. Similar rhetorical gestures, acknowledging a positive connection between ancestral obeah and the power of music, are found at times in the writings of academics as well. Manuel Monestel, for instance, tells us that “the calypsonian, both in the Caribbean in general and in Lim? [Costa Rica], is more than a conventional composer of songs. He is a magical character, with certain power in the style of the obeah man.” Similar claims have been made for the Jamaican dancehall, where, according to Agostinho Pinnock, “the Dancehall male artiste becomes the modernized (African) obeah man. Hence, he and his vast array of psychic and verbal powers, brought through the Middle Passage as part of the retention of a distinctly African identity in the ‘New World’ are recuperated into the present in an effort to resist the modern-day enslavement of ‘ghetto people’ under the guise of Jamaican Independence.”

Does the more nuanced (and even positive) view of obeah suggested by images and passing comments such as these represent the concrete ways in which spiritual power is actually used in the Caribbean today more fully than the monolithically negative one that Rastafarian hard-liners (not to mention Christians) tend to project? In fact, the themes of ancestral power and cultural reclamation do sometimes crop up in the lyrical content of popular songs touching on the theme of obeah. But they are far from the norm, and they exist alongside—and sometimes explicitly in opposition to—a great many other, less positive images. In the following section, I look at the range of themes with which representations of obeah are associated in Caribbean song, before arriving at some general conclusions about the ways that popular music in this part of the world both reflects and helps to shape social consciousness.

INIQUITOUS BY DEFINITION

In Jamaica, the word “iniquity” has a special sense. According to the eminent lexicographers Frederic Cassidy and Robert Le Page, in Jamaican usage this term is actually a synonym for obeah. Thus, in Jamaica, when one hears the phrase “iniquity worker,” it is usually taken to mean “obeah worker.” Here we have a particularly striking illustration of how thought may be colonized (and cultural hegemony at least partly achieved) through a lexico-semantic process of cultural domination. The Jamaican-specific sense of the term in question clearly betrays the enormous influence of nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries and the role they and their successors played in the ongoing colonization of Jamaica and other parts of the region. In their preaching, drawing selectively on the Bible, “iniquity” captured in a single word one of the fundamental concepts of the Manichean theology they sought to impose on African Jamaicans, both during and after slavery. It was a word and a concept that formed an important part of their armament in the long struggle they waged against the understandings of the cosmos that Africans brought with them to the Caribbean. There can be little doubt that, over time, as they insistently identified obeah as a primary example of what they called “iniquity,” a great many of their converts came to agree with them.

It is not surprising, then, that the majority of songs referencing obeah in the Anglophone Caribbean are populated with workers of iniquity of one kind or another. One of the more common images of obeah in popular music is as a kind of antisocial witchcraft or sorcery, used—whether at the request of an obeah man’s client, or out of pure evil-mindedness on the part of the practitioner him- or herself—to cause illness, misfortune, and general suffering. One of the best-known Jamaican popular songs about obeah, Admiral Bailey’s “Science Again” (1989), is a good example:

Dem is me enemy and a gwan [go on; i.e., behave] like me friend Me a tell dem, dem deh sinting [things] cyaan work again It’s a serious ting, nuh badda tek it fe no laughter … Just wet up you Star [newspaper] when dem throw dem obeah Wet up you gate when dem plant dem obeah Spray out you car ‘fore you drive it go no further Tell it to me sister, tell it to me brother It’s a serious ting, nuh badda tek it fe no laughter.

Admiral Bailey is counseling listeners to be on guard, so that they will know when to wash and cleanse (“wet up” or “spray”) the objects and places that evil spirit workers typically invest with harmful obeah—the ground in front of one’s “gate” (residence), for example, in which an obeah worker might bury something to make the proprietor sick, or one’s car, on which the sorcerer might sprinkle some spiritually empowered powder to cause an accident. A number of other songs make similar general allegations about obeah practitioners.

(Continues…)

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