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October 2009
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Aesthetics of the Crossroads
How does a society negotiate a painful past and an uncertain present so as to move forward? Nowhere is the negotiation of the past and the present more complex than in the case of the New World African. While it is possible for continental Africans to return to, and embrace, intrinsically intact tribal cultures if they are so ideologically inclined, the New World African, because of the realities of physical and cultural separation, can only reconstruct, re-member, and re-create concepts of an Africa from which he/she has been separated. However, many West Indian writers have resolved the crisis of separation in favour of aesthetic options which articulate the complexity of their location in a cultural twilight zone. These aesthetic constructs range from Kamau Brathwaite’s nation/Creole language through Wilson Harris’ cross-cultural fusion, Derek Walcott’s federated/mulatto consciousness to Earl Lovelace’s bacchanal aesthetics. Among the first generation of West Indian novelists to contemplate the spirit of Africa in the New World, George Lamming’s effort is perhaps the most illuminating. In Season of Adventure, which is based on the Haitian Ceremony of the Souls, Lamming affirms the existence of a vibrant African spirit in the New World. The Ceremony of the Souls is regarded by the Haitian practitioners of voodoo (the Dahomean/Haitian cousin of the Orisa tradition) as a solemn communication between the living and the dead. During the ceremony, the dead return to offer, through the medium of the Houngan (Priest), a full and honest account of their relationship with the living. The African antecedent of this ceremony is, of course, the Egungun Festival (the Festival of Ancestors), which manifests, in concrete and imagistic terms, the African rendezvous with the past. Lovelace, on the other hand, especially in Salt (1996), reiterates the African ethos in the New World and advances it beyond the metaphorical to an aesthetic construct defined as bacchanal aesthetics. Bacchanal aesthetics, at a basic level, is the artistic practice that appropriates and radicalises the underground cultural practices fashioned by ordinary New World Africans to deal with the realities of enslavement, colonisation, deracination and exploitation. As process, bacchanal aesthetics is the aesthetics of the crossroads or the crucible of history and cultures. The greater the number of roads intersecting at a crossroads, the more vibrant (for those who understand the layout) or confusing (for strangers) it becomes. Bacchanal aesthetics is, therefore, the aesthetics of the crossroads as the meeting point of possibilities: the old and the new; official and unofficial interpretations; the cardinal points of meanings and/or the world; the secular and the mundane; and so on. Lovelace’s practice of bacchanal aesthetics recognises the fluidity and instability inherent in all cultures as works-in-progress and welcomes such fluidity and instability as rationales for the artist’s freedom to experiment in order to advance the frontiers of style and vision. It is Lovelace’s embrace of elements of bacchanal aesthetics, for example, which drives the Carnival-inspired experiments in novels in which the narrators sing or use calypsoes as meta-narrative threads, so much so that I have described these novels elsewhere as novelypsoes. Lovelace’s journey to a consciousness of New World African culture as theme and style is both instructive and emblematic of the influence of colonial education and ethos on the colonial subject. Our writers have courageously mined our cultures for bold and unique aesthetic paradigms with which to return us to the centre of our stories and/or our stories to the centre of our life. The questions that follow are: Have our critics embraced the need to match our writers with interpretations that are equally bold and native to our persons? If our writers write of, and for us, do our critics practice their art of criticism in our interest? It would, of course, require another lecture to answer these questions. Suffice it, then, to say that the challenge for our aspiring literary critics today is how (while mastering the plethora of imported cosmopolitan literary theories) they can generate their own theories that can speak to us as a people with a unique history and experience. The full text of Prof Aiyejina’s lecture is available online, under Distinguished Open Lectures at www.sta.uwi.edu Funso Aiyejina is Professor of Literatures in English and Dean, Faculty of Humanities and Education, The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. Trinidad and Tobago. |
Professor Funso Aiyejina was feature speaker at the 2009 distinguished lecture series of the Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilisation (CBAAC), Lagos, at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria, in July. His lecture, “Esu Elegbara: A Source of an Alter/native Theory of African Literature and Criticism,” is an excerpt from his inaugural lecture, “Decolonising Myth: From Esu to Bacchanal Aesthetics,” which he is currently expanding. The lecture seeks to reposition historical and current ideas on the nature of Esu, the Yoruba deity of the cross-roads and to examine the ways that writers from Africa and the Caribbean have deployed the concept of Esu as an aesthetic paradigm. The lecture was enthusiastically received by the Nigerian audience and described in The Punch (Lagos) as “deepening the irony that it is the Diaspora that now usually speaks to Africa on the need to uphold [its] cultural heritage.” The Punch also reported Prof Aiyejina as lamenting that “religious prejudices had done African values a lot of harm.” The paper quoted him as saying, “I am not saying you must be a traditionalist, but if you are a Christian or a Muslim, you should understand and respect tradition. No culture is absolutely positive or negative. That is why each culture is always reviewing itself.”