One of my favorite academic articles, for the sake of literary style among other things, is Joan Dayan’s “Caribbean Cannibals and Whores” (Raritan 9:2 [Fall 1989]: 45-68). Here are a few passages from it:
1. In Haitian ceremonies of vodoun, the most spendid of the gods is Erzulie-Fréda. She is also known to be the most contradictory…
2. In her various incarnations Erzulie forces us to question the very nature of representation: she takes shape somewhere in between the Western idea of the sublime and what is the greatest risk, but the most critical fact of vodoun, desire trying to realize itself.
3. If Caliban has been claimed as image for the black man’s response to an alien language and abusive history, I will take the eccentric Erzulie as ground for a new ethics of voice.
4. Woman, the point of slippage between the extremes of purity and filth, comes into the Caribbean text as part of, or is seen through, another source of alternating fascination and repulsion: the Carib Indians of the Windward Islands.
5. In his 1948 Orphée noir, Sartre defined négritude as the descent of the black man into the hell of his soul to retrieve his Eurydice. More a love song between two apparent opponents – the elite black writer and his cultivated white reader – than a means of change, the required plunge into the depths remained a male endeavor: the woman mere passage to his song.
6. Her status replayed in an uncanny way the experience of the colonized, fighting to speak. And once he spoke, he appropriated his muse, and metaphorized her out of existence.
7. Derek Walcott’s Another Life (1973) records his search for an acceptable muse. The poem remains his most candid, and troubling, testimony to the perils in what should be exaltation and privilege: the New World Adam blessed by “Adams task of giving things their names.” . . . The Caribs, decimated, can startle his language into beauty. . . Caught between Carib and African, Walcott uses woman in a way that reveals his particular relation to power.
8. The accounts of both Deren and Hurston suggest how difficult it is to reveal the clandestine, to translate into writing the call of the vodoun gods. Erzulie, in her moves between the extremes of abandon and denial, tempts us to impose a Western religious schema on vodoun…But in her actions as loa, she rids herself of representation and urges us to confgront an experience that trades on both sexual and racial ambiguity.
9. The history of colonization, the romantic voyage to exotic lands…remains intimately tied to gothic tales of power and submission. What do you do with what you do not know?
10. A turn to both the vodoun tradition and to the modern women writers of the Caribbean could lay bare the underpinnings of the male intellectual power strugcture and uncover where, in the name of Caribbean identity and revolution, it exploits and distorts the female culture that vodoun both sustains and preserves.
This, of course, does not even summarize the article, but it allows us at least to see some of its traces.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Dear Professor Zero,
Greetings!
Give thanks for the great post! Some of these may seem self-congratulatory, but if ah so, ah so.
“If Caliban has been claimed as image for the black man’s response to an alien language and abusive history, I will take the eccentric Erzulie as ground for a new ethics of voice.”
Brathwaite takes a similar position with his Sycorax style–Born to Slow Horses.
“In his 1948 Orphée noir, Sartre defined négritude as the descent of the black man into the hell of his soul to retrieve his Eurydice. More a love song between two apparent opponents – the elite black writer and his cultivated white reader – than a means of change, the required plunge into the depths remained a male endeavor: the woman mere passage to his song.”
Benjamin, my son by Geoffrey Philp represents this descent into hell, which is why the novels begins with the word, “Bumbo” – one of the vilest Jamaican “bad” words which is tied to the female menstrual cycle.
Derek Walcott’s Another Life (1973) records his search for an acceptable muse. The poem remains his most candid, and troubling, testimony to the perils in what should be exaltation and privilege: the New World Adam blessed by “Adams task of giving things their names.” . . . The Caribs, decimated, can startle his language into beauty. . . Caught between Carib and African, Walcott uses woman in a way that reveals his particular relation to power.”
Add also the European. Walcott sucessfully names and begins his epic with the light of the Caribbean. See his great poem, “Light of the World” and watch Erzulie take shape in fron of your eyes.
“The history of colonization, the romantic voyage to exotic lands…remains intimately tied to gothic tales of power and submission. What do you do with what you do not know?”
But that is telling the story from the outside–Gauguin, Shakespeare, et al. What happens when you tell the story from the other side of the Conrad’s river?
Peace,
Geoffrey
Thanks Geoffrey for this brilliant comment! We are going to study it and reread Brathwaite and Walcott – and read you!
Give thanks, Professor Zero!