Crossing the Border between Secular and Religious: Dancehall’s Spiritual Cleansing Rituals
Aside from the economic imperatives guiding Dancehall Kings and Queens, there are important spiritual benefits which accrue to Dancehall participants, which should not be ignored. Dancehall is a space of Afro-Jamaican religiosity manifested in dance, horn and drum. DJs are griots and their fans follow them as a religious devotee follows a prophet or guru. VybzKartel is known to his fans as simply “The Teacha” ‘The Teacher.’ In his letter to the Gleaner editor, Kartel adopts a Christ-like stance when he compares his adversaries to the Scribes and Pharisees of the New Testament (Palmer). Dancers are similarly crowned as gods in the Dancehall space. Niaah writes “if one is crowned a dancer - in an event such as the Dancehall queen competition or through continued exposure at dance events – one becomes like a god” (“Kingston’s Dancehall” 112). Hope considers Dancehall a secular space; however, other scholars (Stolzoff; Cooper) find ritualistic and religious attributes. Niaah makes a strong case for Dancehall as a sacred space. She describes the dance floor as consecrated ground, a feature which she locates in the physical demarcation of space in Dancehall events. The dance floor is an inner sanctum located directly in front of the Selector, around which patrons will skirt until the moment of spiritual connection is reached (Niaah, “Making Space”; “Kingston’s Dancehall”). Dancehall draws on elements of Christianity, Kumina, Revival, Jonkonnu, Myalism and other traditional Jamaican folklore. This chapter will explore the ambivalent history of “folk” culture in Jamaica, and how it reverberates through Dancehall’s “Obeah” discourses. Through an investigation of Jamaica’s queen narrative, the chapter will also examine the specific ways in which Dancehall culture draws on Kumina, Bruckins and Jonkonnu in terms of its curative properties, spirit possession, dance steps, masking, costuming, and communication through dance, horn and drum. The chapter will focus in detail on TekWehYuhself and the Sweep. These dance moves and songs constitute “cleansing rituals” in the contemporary Dancehall, which are variations on the Kumina steps dancers learned as school children within theatrical productions.
It is difficult to privilege one African culture such as Kongo in the development of traditional Jamaican religions and folkways. For example, Yoruban retentions are also present in Jamaican culture. Lewin writes of the myriad African influences which have formed Jamaican “folk” culture, only to be popularized in Dancehall culture. Just a few of these are Jonkonnu, Bruckins, Revival, Kumina and Maroon; these combined with Mento to provide the basis for Reggae and Dancehall music and culture. In many of the Afro-Jamaican religions, ancestral worship is central. Ancestral spirits play an important role in the everyday life of these traditional communities. Spirit possession and trance-like states reached through dance are desirable and integral to the ritualistic cleansing offered by dance and music in these religions (Lewin 148). Lewin writes “this belief focuses on a view of life wherein the lines of demarcation between what the average person may view as the real, tangible world and that of the unreal world of spirits and gods are in a sense non-existent” (Lewin 148).
This blurring of the borderlines between real and unreal, reality and fantasy is characteristic of Dancehall culture as well. According to Niaah, it involves a transition through “social, psychological and spatial states for the individual and the group” (“Making Space” 128). The passage through preparation during the day, transport to the dance event, and back home after daybreak represents one set of transitions. Then there is the passage during the dance into other states, which consecrate the Dancehall as a sacred space:
Especially for key participants such as a Dancehall Queen, the (rite de) passage from home to the dance, through thedance event and the return home, as well as the passage during the event intoother states, passage from non-entity into legitimacy of purpose during theevent and among its working/under class communicants, delineates in the Dancehall space a sanctified temple. The persistence of this nightly celebrationmerges the ritual with the everyday blurring the boundaries to extend Dancehall into daily existence; a different world inside but outside society. One could alsoargue based on Dancehall's mostly non-seasonal nature that it exists within akind of social limbo. There is really never incorporation back into the everydayas the everyday becomes the entire ritual of preparation, communion, withdrawal and rest, then back to preparation all over again (Niaah, “Making Space” 128-9).
The ordinary lives of important personages such as Dancehall Kings and Queens become extraordinary existences in which opulence, spiritual and material decadence become reality. The lucky ones escape poverty and deprivation by earning a living from Dancehall; the rest create alternate realities. Just as night blends into daybreak at the dance, the borderlines are blurred between presence of the self and states of spirit possession. Dancehall creates feelings of ecstasy, or being transported outside of the self in rapturous contemplation of the divine. These extraordinary experiences become the everyday lives of the dancers. There is, as Niaah describes, no incorporation back into ordinary everyday life for the devoted Dancehall practitioner.
The moment of spirit possession achieved through dancing is known as “going into Myal” when it occurs at Maroon, Kumina or Revival ceremonies (Lewin 191). Myalism was a religious practice of the 1840s, in which spirit possession took the form of violent movements and dancing (Lewin 190). Myalism and the Native Baptist Movement also aided the development of the Great Revival of 1861. The roots of the Great Revival were African and Christian; however, the means to reach salvation were more African than European. The beginnings of Revival are found in missionary Christianity, especially the Native Baptist church, which has always been more inclusive in terms of its membership (Lewin 191). In fact, the Revival tune “If I Had the Wings of a Dove” inspired the first Ska song (Lewin 150). Myal, generally understood as good magic or medicine, is to be contrasted with Obeah, or evil. In post-Emancipation Jamaica, Obeah came to be a pejorative term that for many encompassed all the African religious practices and retentions. For others, Obeah became magic practiced for bad purposes, defined as hurting or manipulating people. The anti-Obeah discourse became a way to deal with the widescale social transformations and resulting discomforts experienced by the majority of the population during the post-Emancipation era. Orthodox Christianity worked to repress the African cultures, condemning all African religious practice as Obeah. The Myalist ‘Medicine Man,’ or ‘Obeah-Puller,’ emerged during the 1840s as a sorcerer able to remove the Obeah, dis-ease and disharmony from individuals in the changing society. Today, Obeah occupies an ambivalent place in Dancehall discourse, at once criticized, feared and respected within Selectors’ utterances and artists’ song lyrics. The Orthodox Christian churches continue to condemn Obeah, reinforcing the negative association it holds for the majority of Jamaicans, although some people may practice it in secret. Contemporary Obeah discourses should be clearly distinguished from the bonafide religions of Kumina, Revival, Maroon groups and other folk cultures.
Sylvia Wynter’s piece, “Jonkonnu in Jamaica,” is astounding in its historicization and critical treatment of a phenomenon which others have studied only empirically or with sentimental romanticism. Wynter begins her study discussing the way in which “folk” culture in Jamaica occupies a space of ambivalence which is the colonial legacy of the Jamaican psyche (34). There is an insecurity and lack of confidence that coalesces with a widespread shame and embarrassment amongst the majority of Jamaicans regarding the indigenous folk cultures and their African characteristics (35). This sense of shame is widespread by 1825, claims Wynter (see appendix 1, Chronology of Jamaican Folk Culture). Wynter wrote this piece in the 1970s, when the shame of African culture was even more pronounced than it is today. Unfortunately, much of the same consternation regarding Revival traditions, Kumina, and African-derived religious practices persists in the contemporary society. During my fieldwork, I experienced this uncomfortable sense of shame and fear when I visited Revival and Zion churches in Sav-la-Mar. My friend and companion, a Jehovah’s Witness, was most concerned that we were seeking devil worshippers and refused to get out of the car as I went to inquire among the people in the neighborhood about the churches. The same Europhilia was evident in the British-derived Quadrille dance that Wynter claims was popular during the 1950s. I found this predilection for Quadrille reproduced in an interview with a dancer’s father, a man born in the cohort that reached young adulthood during the 1950s and 1960s. When I asked him what kind of dances he used to do, he emphasized his taste for the Quadrille. It is important to note, however, that even Jamaican Quadrille is an Africanized version of the staid British dance.
None of the dancers I interviewed admitted to any involvement in Revival, although it is quite clear that it is a root of Ska, Reggae and Dancehall. Instead, dancers claimed an allegiance to Kumina, as I discuss in the next chapter in terms of the links dancers made between Daggerin and Kumina:
Interviewer: What is your opinion of Dancehall’s connection to Africa, as far as dance steps, is there a relationship?
Dancer: Yes, I think so, cuz you know Kumina, all of our dance steps kind of look like it.
This attachment to Kumina amongst Kingstonian dancers makes sense since it is one of the Revivalist cults that persist today along with Pukkumina and Zion (see appendix 1, Chronology of Jamaican Folk Culture). Kumina originated in the eastern parish of St. Thomas. Kingston, also located in the eastern part of the island, became an important base of activity for Kumina Queen ‘Queenie’ Imogene Kennedy. Queenie is responsible for opening up the Kumina world to the rest of Jamaicans during the post-Independence period, through her lifelong efforts to make Kumina accessible to researchers and government officials (Lewin 277-303). Whereas the dancers’ grandparents would have been more familiar with Revival,[1] the younger generation is also quite knowledgeable about Kumina since it has received much attention from civic cultural groups since 1963 (Lewin 12). Kumina is the most African of the Revival cults; thus, it is significant that dancers and artists claim it as their inspiration, as opposed to the more Christian cult Zion. The Kumina influence is widespread in today’s Dancehall, as we see in the song of the same name by Guidance and dancer Sample Six. In the video, dancers wear traditional costumes and perform the old-time dance step, while adding Dancehall’s unique spice of individual improvisation and divine inspiration. The Kumina trend is not limited to the dancers alone. Carrying the Kumina influence into the DJ field, artist Busy Signal produced a song entitled “Up in Har Belly,” which was built upon the Kumina rhythm, and an enormously popular dance hit in 2009. Also worth mentioning is Mr. Vegas’s song entitled “Daggering,” in which the video references traditional Kumina dancing, drumming and costuming, as well as the “vacunao”[2] or stab of the male’s Daggerin thrust into the female.
Wynter likens folk culture to cultural guerilla warfare (“Jonkonnu” 36). She claims that the African slave used “folk” culture to resist the onslaught of the plantation economy and to save his own humanity (36). She writes that the history of folk culture in Jamaica is the history of this ambivalent relation between two contradictory processes, one as creator of rehumanized Nature through folklore and the other as plough for the conquest of Nature (36). In the beginning of Jamaica’s colonial period, Wynter defines the cultural process as indigenization, in which the rooting of the African in the new environment of the New World commenced. This entailed adapting African cultural processes to the Jamaican context. The drum, horn and dance were integral components of this indigenization period. The Maroons employed all three, using the Abeng horn and drum to communicate, and employing dance to reach spirit possession. Wynter calls these the drum scripts, or drum rhythms that form a language. They are a mode of communication among the living and the ancestors. We find that the drum, horn and dance still form a mode of communication within Dancehall. The horn sound motif is played by the Selector numerous times throughout a Dancehall event as the crescendo of intensity builds, transporting participants to various states of consciousness. The drum rhythms are clearly reproduced except they are now blasted over mega-watt speakers, audible for miles around.
Lastly, there is dance. Although the dancers I interviewed did not candidly admit any involvement in Afro-Jamaican religions entailing spirit possession, certain dancers did state a very clear understanding of the way in which dance formed a language of communication between themselves, their families and their ancestors. These young iconoclastic dancers had a vision of their connection to African creativity, performance, dance and music:
Dancer: You see,our tradition is through music, our ancestors and our godparents, through music it translates by dancing, our drums and instruments.
Interviewer: What is your opinion of Dancehall culture’s connection to Africa?
Dancer: Well, as you can see, we both got a lot in common, Africans associate by dancing, by all of those beats and different moves, reflex and all of those tings.
Interviewer: What do you mean that they associate by dancing?
Dancer: Back in the day, our ancestors used to associate by dancing, it’s something like a language that they keep among themselves.
Interviewer: So it’s a way of communicating?
Dancer: Yeah, you can talk to each other through it.
Interviewer: Do you think it’s a way of communicating today, now?
Dancer: Yeah, even when you’re dancing now, you are communicating with the music, and then you are communicating with the audience, that’s how you are going to attract the audience.
These dancers, while not explicitly claiming to practice any Myalism or Revival, have a very clear understanding of the importance of their ancestors, known as the Nkugu in Kumina language, or the Egungun in Yoruba. These dancers also acknowledge the importance of dance as a language and means of communication in the past and present. Dance is a unifier within the African Diaspora, and Dancehall displays a repertoire of basic movements that comprise a vocabulary.[3] Through this medium of dance language, performers communicate familiarity and fluency in Dancehall’s kinaesthetics and Jamaica’s nationalist discourses of movement such as Kumina, Bruckins and Jonkonnu.
African-derived religions adapted and incorporated Christianity but the reverse did not occur, claims Wynter. Christianity early on assumed a Manichean posture towards the African-derived religious practices of Jamaica, painting all Myalism and African-derived animism as evil. The Jamaican folk culture of the 17th and early 18th centuries was characterized by Jonkonnu processions, River Mumma dances, the Dahomey Sky Cult, the Death and Rebirth cults and Myalist Doctor Plays (among many others). Eventually, all of these African-derived religious practices coalesced under the unifying rubric of Myalism, which in 1774 was prohibited by the British (see appendix 1, Chronology of Jamaican Folk Culture). The drum, dance and horn of the Myal spelled revolt and had to be outlawed. The British permitted the “secular” Jonkonnu processions, committing the Western fallacy that secular and sacred are dichotomous rather than a unity within African cosmologies. Jonkonnu became secularized and billed exclusively for entertainment, when in fact it drew on the same Myalist religious practices of spirit possession through dance. Given the history of Jamaica’s cultural indigenization, the lines become blurred between African religious practice and “secular” Dancehall which is solely for entertainment.
Myal was not to be denied, emerging triumphant in the Great Myal Procession of the 1840s. Erna Brodber’s novel, Myal, presents an anti-colonial critique of Christianity. Her marvelous narrative depicts the orthodox Christian intolerance of the Myalist traditions in Jamaica, as opposed to the Native Baptist point of contact with Myalism which formed the Revival cults. These Revival cults relied upon immersion in water in addition to the Myal spirit possession through dance. Paul Bogle, leader of the Morant Bay Rebellion, preached in a Native Baptist church in his village in the eastern parish of St. Thomas (Holt 290). The symphony of horn and drum was a well-known feature of revolt by the time the Morant Bay Rebellion occurred in 1865 (Holt 296). Brodber and Wynter’s work point to the need for Jamaicans, especially orthodox Christians, to come to terms with this history and the African religious practices that are so foundational to Jamaican culture. Pukkumina, Zion and Rastafarian religions are harmonious and holistic syncretisms of Afro-Christianity. They represent the opposite reaction of the Manichean stance Christianity takes towards the African religions. African Jamaica can absorb Christianity, but Western Christianity cannot accept the African. This conflict between Western Judaeo-Christian doctrines and African gender flexibility becomes evident in the repression of homosexuality which is so widespread in Jamaican society. The orthodox Christian element finds its way into Dancehall culture, manifesting itself as an intolerance of homosexuality. The Dancehall discourse of anti-Obeah utterances (“wi a bun out obeah”‘ we condemn or burn Obeah’) could be interpreted as a censure of African animist religion, but given Dancehall’s predilection for Kumina and Jonkonnu, this is unlikely. Rather, we can read the Dancehall space as playing the contemporary role of the “Medicine Man pulling out Obeah,” which featured so prominently in the Great Myal Procession of the 1840s. There is a marked absence of any Dancehall discourses openly promoting Myal or “spirit possession through dance,” although it is quite clear that dancers go into another psychic state while performing. Dancehall displays monotheistic expressions of Christianity combined with a palpable African religiosity and ethos located in dancers’ claims of Kumina as foundational to their movements; claims which are vigorously denied by the cultural gatekeepers of middle-class propriety.