Possessing the Self: Caribbean Identities in Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse.

Zora Neale Hurston's leap beyond national boundaries in her 1938 book of Caribbean folklore, Tell My Horse, indicates her cross-cultural interest in identity politics at the beginning of World War II. Unfortunately, much of what Hurston had to say about the international political arena in the late 1930s and the 1940s was excised from her autobiography and continues to be marginalized in her canon because many critics assume that Hurston was "mainly a novelist and folklorist, not a political analyst" (Hemenway 248), and those critics who do address Hurston's political orientation often find her comments consistent with her "reactionary politics." [1] Hurston's interest in Caribbean history and religion, however, can be read as an intriguing international political gesture. Situated among descriptive ethnography, political commentary, and colorful travelogue, Tell My Horse, is both generically and politically ambiguous. [2] Hurston's politics are particularly challenging because she praises the nineteen-year A merican occupation of Haiti in her section on "Politics and Personalities in Haiti"--an imperialist political stance that seems at odds with her sincere anthropological interest in the culture of Haiti and with her academic training under Franz Boas. [3]

As a black American ethnographer working on the cultures of the Caribbean, Hurston seems caught between defending the U.S. imperial "possession" of Haiti and simultaneously critiquing it by highlighting spiritual possession of Haitian voodoo rituals as a strategy of resistance to colonial politics. The resulting tension between an imperial nationalism articulated explicitly within the political context of American occupation and the cultural, anthropological discourse of Hurston's observations on voodoo leads to an unresolved dialectic in Tell My Horse. This contradiction is instructive, however, because it reveals the construction of a national "Other" as an intensely complex and always ambiguous task which ultimately mirrors the culture and politics of the ethnographer more than that of her subjects.

Because Hurston subtly subverts her mainstream, public, pro-U.S. discourse with her comments on Haitian cultural practices, voodoo in Hurston's work emerges as a subversive, international political gesture that helps to produce a global trans-Caribbean space. Hurston's focus on voodoo is indeed political, for in the figuration of "possession" we find the connection between the material and spiritual history of trans-Caribbean cultures. These cultures are marked by the centrality of slavery and the mutation of cultural memories shared by West African, Caribbean, and Black Southern communities. [4]

Historical Specters of United States Imperialism

At the time Hurston wrote Tell My Horse, Caribbean identities were perceived by Americans as exotic "others." When Hurston visited Jamaica and Haiti in 1936 and 1937, she came at the end of the nineteen-year occupation of Haiti (1915-1934), an effort by the U.S. to ensure military dominance in the Caribbean and to "civilize" Caribbean nations that seemed to lack good self-government and democratic values. As historian Hans Schmidt explains, the international political reason for occupying Haiti was to prevent a German attack during World War 1, because Germany's naval power was considered a threat to American hegemony. Schmidt argues that, "largely because of this postulated military danger, United States troops occupied Haiti, the Dominican Republic, the Virgin Islands, and parts of Cuba in 1915, 1916, and 1917, thereby completing the American garrisoning of the Greater Antilles with the exception of British Jamaica" (9). Ensuring American military dominance went hand in hand with the political missionary id eal of spreading liberal democracy. Schmidt cites Woodrow Wilson's remarks about "teaching South American republics to 'elect good men' and his frequent insistence that the United States had a moral responsibility to promote constitutional, democratic government in the Caribbean area" (10). The reality of the occupation however sharply contradicted its mission:

Racist preconceptions reinforced by the current debasement of Haiti's political institutions placed the Haitians far below levels Americans considered necessary for democracy, self-government, and constitutionalism. The generous and even noble narcissist compulsion to bestow American civilization was stymied by self-defeating ethnocentric prejudices, cultivated during several centuries of domination over Indians and black slaves, which stigmatized the subject peoples as genetically and culturally inferior. (Schmidt 10)

In the wake of the American occupation of Haiti, Hurston invariably encountered such racist stereotypes, dating back to the years when the press of the occupying forces maligned Haitian culture and indulged American fantasies of an exotic Caribbean "Other." Wade Davis explains that American and European correspondents brought back sensationalist tales that "indulged their readers' perverse infatuation with what was known as the Black Republic, serving it up garnished with every conceivable figment of their imaginations" (Serpent 208).

In a political climate that constructed cultural "otherness" as inferiority, "exotic" cultural practices such as voodoo worship and spirit possession often served political narratives. [5] For "civilized" U.S. citizens, rumors of "barbaric" practices confirmed the cultural inferiority of Haitians. Joan Dayan explains how such exoticism aids the construction of national(ist) discourses:

It should not surprise us that during the American occupation, from 1915 to 1934, tales of cannibalism, torture, and zombies were published in this country. What better way to justify the "civilizing" presence of marines in Haiti than to project the phantasm of barbarism? (33)

When Hurston wrote Tell My Horse, voodoo played a central role in constructing such cultural otherness, and it may be argued that it still does today. "Representations of vodoun have usually served a political purpose, whether President Elie Lescot's support of the Catholic Church and its 'anti-superstition' campaign in 1941 to clear land for the United States rubber production or 'Papa Doc' Duvalier's cynical deformation of what he called a uniquely Haitian tradition" (Dayan 33). Joan Dayan argues that there is a link between the repression of the peasantry and the way vodoun practices are described both in Haiti and abroad. Hurston would probably agree with Dayan that "a mythologized Haiti of zombies, sorcery, and witch doctors helps derail our attention from the real causes of poverty and suffering: economic exploitation, color prejudice, and political guile"(33).

The political exploitation of religious practices certainly made Hurston's efforts to promote voodoo as a legitimate religion more difficult both abroad and in Haiti. Ethnobotanist Wade Davis explains that Hurston was pursuing research on topics that were not scientifically and academically credited. [6] It is not surprising, therefore, that when Hurston published her thesis on the zombie phenomenon it was ignored in the United States; and in Haiti, where anti-superstition campaigns were under way, it earned her the scorn of the intellectual community (Davis, Serpent 214).

Hurston registers the negative bias against voodoo mainly among the Haitian upper class, who wished to deny the existence of voodoo altogether: "The upper-class Haitian is steeped in voodoo traditions but he will 'lie' to save his own and the national pride" (Tell 83). Much like the American outsider, the upper-class Haitian

has read the fantastic things that have been written about Haitian Voodoo by people who know nothing at all about it. Consequently, there are the stereotyped tales of virgin worship, human sacrifice and other elements borrowed from European origins. All this paints the Haitian as a savage and he does not like to be spoken of like that. (83-84)

Hurston criticizes the politics of cultural "othering" and locates its origins not only in traditional Western anthropological narratives but also in the social class system of Haiti itself. By examining voodoo's intersection with class affiliation, Hurston discovers the existence of public and private narratives about voodoo that sharply divide peasantry and elite. Hurston writes, "Voodoo has more enemies in public and more friends in private than any-thing else in Haiti" (92). As a result, voodoo rituals are publicly repressed and silenced in Haiti, whereas abroad they serve the construction of a "savage" image of the Black Republic with the specific political purpose of justifying the American occupation. While any form of writing about a nation is always an invention, Joan Dayan suggests that "perhaps no other Caribbean island has inspired such extreme invention, such impressive paraphrase" as has Haiti (32).

While Hurston clearly recognizes and even critiques the American political exploitation of cultural practices such as voodoo, she also finds herself trapped in American rhetorical justifications for the occupation. Hurston's construction of this public, dominant narrative in Tell My Horse bears all the characteristics of what James Scott calls the "public transcript":

In ideological terms the public transcript will typically, by its accomodationist tone, provide convincing evidence for the hegemony of dominant values, for the hegemony of dominant discourse. It is in precisely this public domain where the effects of power relations are most manifest, and any analysis based exclusively on the public transcript is likely to conclude that subordinate groups endorse the terms of their subordination and are willing, even enthusiastic, partners in that subordination. (4)

Hurston's chapter "Rebirth of a Nation" can be read as the "public transcript" of Tell My Horse. In this chapter, Hurston describes the American intervention in Haiti, beginning with the overthrow of President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, as the beginning of peace in a country torn by bloody revolution:

They sought peace under kingdoms and other ruling names. They sought it in the high cold, beautiful mountains of the island and in the sudden small alluvial plains, but it eluded them and vanished from their hands. (65)

In this version of the national narrative, Haiti's unsuccessful search for peace is ended by American "peacekeeping forces," symbolized by the black plume of the American battleship, the U.S.S. Washington, against the Caribbean sky. Hurston's nationalistic prophecy clearly serves to justify the U.S. military presence in and occupation of Haiti. This reading of Haitian history in "Rebirth of a Nation" is representative of the way many Americans understood it: as a succession of struggles and military revolutions, internal political corruption, and bloody massacres that reigned in the country after Haiti gained its independence in 1804.

Why did Hurston, with her fine anthropological observation skills, seem to propagate such a rhetoric of salvation through military occupation? As a national outsider and member of the once occupying nation, Hurston admits that she encountered much anti-U.S. sentiment during her stay in Haiti. Hurston felt she had to steel herself against accusations that the United States over powered and "robbed" the island. Hurston believed the opposite was true. Because the American press stressed the occupation's political protection and economic improvements in Haiti, Hurston saw the U.S. military presence as an improvement in Haiti's economy. In Hurston's words, "The occupation is ended and Haiti is left with a stable currency, the beginnings of a system of transportation, a modem capitol, the nucleus of a modem army" (74). Hurston's defense of American economic and political protectionism abroad might also have been caused by the extreme poverty that she witnessed during her stay. When talking to many poor peasant informers, she noticed that "hunger and want were stalking the land" (87).

Undeniably, Haiti was ravaged by poverty, especially after the 1929 world depression, which undermined the country's export economy (Knight 183). But poverty and everyday conditions for Haitian peasants were not significantly better under U.S. occupation than after it. Historians agree that "the occupation gave Haiti little in return for its denial of the claim of national sovereignty. The public works and reform programs instituted by the United States hardly endured longer than the occupation itself" (Mintz 279). Hurston is undeniably responding to existing material conditions, but she is also trapped in American rhetorical justifications for the occupation, particularly when she stresses infrastructure improvements over political independence. Haiti's most astute politicians, she tells us, "see that all is not well, that public education, transportation and economics need more attention, much more than do the bones of Dessalines," Haiti's revolutionary leader (80). Hurston's echo of an American imperialist discourse that emphasizes material improvements was part of a prevalent theme of the American presence. According to Hans Schmidt, "American efforts to uplift and 'civilize' Haiti emphasized material achievements, technological modernization, organizational efficiency, and the cultivation of pragmatic as opposed to esthetic or spiritual attitudes" (13). Hurston is clearly rehearsing imperialistic and nationalistic Americ an discourses.

Hurston's praise of the occupation's progress in the construction of roads, hospitals, and other public service institutions not only reinforces the dominant public U.S. narrative but also reveals her growing disenchantment with political rhetoric as opposed to practical improvements. The Haitian leaders whom Hurston cites in Tell My Horse are "men of action." In the context of the world-wide depression, Hurston seems increasingly interested in economic solutions to racial problems in America and abroad. She feels that the times have changed, and with characteristic exaggeration, she launches her argument for racial progress based on material equity instead of the ones of social justice:

America has produced a generation of Negroes who are impatient of the orators. They want to hear about more jobs and houses and meat on the table. ... Our heroes are no longer talkers but doers. This leaves some of our "race" men and women of yesterday puzzled and hurt. "Race leaders" are simply obsolete. The man and woman of today in America is the one who makes us believe he can make our side-meat taste like ham.

These same sentiments are mounting in Haiti. (77)

Reminiscent of Booker T. Washington's polemics, Hurston's words are best understood in the context of the world depression which produced a tension between racial and class affiliations for many black American intellectuals. [7] The patriotic denial of Haiti's upper class, specifically its failure to recognize the existence of serious economic problems, angers Hurston and makes her complain about the "self-deception" of some members of this upper class, whose patriotic pride overshadows their obvious problems: "They would like to say that Haiti is a happy and well-ordered country and so they just say it, obvious facts to the contrary" (84). Hurston is also impatient with those who refuse responsibility for the social ills of Haiti and try to blame them on outside political influences. Because neither denial nor blame will remedy the situation, Hurston values those national leaders who are "men of action." It is precisely the Haitian elite in power, however, who tend to echo the stereotyped cast of mainstream, protectionist American narratives. Hurston's pro-Americanism is confirmed in her discussions with political leaders of Haiti such Dr. Rulx Leon, Director General of the Public Health Department, an institution started by the Occupation; "Young Dr. Sam"; Elie Lescot, Haitian minister at Washington and later president; Dividnaud, Minister of the Interior; and Colonel Calixe [sic], Chief of the Garde d'Haiti, who was trained under the American military officers of the occupation and with whom Hurston was greatly impressed. The narrative conceived by these public heros--men who emerged during or in the wake of the Occupation and who continued doing its work--is that of the public political elite.

Folklore as Transgressive Caribbean Text

These pro-American voices produce a public narrative that contrasts sharply with that of the peasantry of Haiti, whose stories and cultural practices differ greatly from the "official" narrative. Hurston engages in a kind of double writing typical of colonial discourse and representative of the pedagogical function of nationalist discourses. Homi Bhabha explains that the production of the nation as narration always entails a split between "pedagogical" and "performative" forces that construct national discourse. According to Bhabha, there is a "tension between signifying the people as an a priori historical presence, a pedagogical object; and the people constructed in the performance of the narrative, its enunciatory 'present' marked in the repetition and pulsation of the national sign" (147). Hurston's diametrically opposed narratives of occupational discourse--motivated by an imperialist American nationalism and a transgressive black Caribbean text which thrives on strategies of inversion--both erect and si multaneously destroy the boundaries of a national culture, American or Haitian. The difference between public and private, pedagogical and performative discourses in Hurston's text is highlighted by the fact that representatives of the public narrative literally speak a different language from those who articulate the counter-discourse. Hurston writes, "As things stand, the upper[-]class Haitians speak French and the peasants speak Creole" (91). This language barrier, "a serious thing in a nation," divides public narrative from private narrative, upper class from lower class, ruling dominant elite from subordinate groups. The impression that there is a firm boundary between these two discourses is deceptive, however. Rather than a clear boundary, there is an ambivalent movement between public and private, pedagogical and performative.

Hurston's own text oscillates between these two modes of discourse and illustrates the political ambiguity of her own national narratives. On the one hand, Hurston's "pedagogical" public discourse of nationhood, which highlights the difference between a strong nation and a struggling "republic," serves to produce an image of Haiti as the "other." On the other hand, Hurston inverts and critiques such "otherness" in the chapter "Isle de la Gonave," in which the theme of Haiti's search for peace is echoed in the local lore--with a crucial difference. The island was once a whale who carried the sleeping wife of the god Damballah on his back. Damballah sent his wife on a mission to bring peace to the people of Haiti. The ride on the back of the whale was so comfortable, however, that she fell asleep and the whale dared not wake her to tell her they had arrived at their destination. So everyday the whale swims out to sea, and every evening he comes back to harbor so Damballah's wife may alight should she awake. Li ke Hurston's public narrative in "Rebirth of a Nation," this myth expresses a wish for peace in Haiti. The peaceful life style of the mythical woman corresponds to Hurston's own experience: "I found on this remote island a peace I have never known anywhere else on earth" (135). [8] But Hurston contrasts her own experience of peace and the nation's desire for peace with the violence of military occupation.

The islanders tell a story of an American officer of the occupation named Whitney, who found a stone on the island that contained the power of a god, a loa. This stone had so much spiritual power that it not only sweated in people's hands--the test for a spirit in the stone--but it urinated. Whitney wanted the curious stone as a decoration for his desk despite the natives' warnings of its powerful and unusual qualities. The stone urinated on several occasions on the American officer's desk, so that he had to move it outdoors again. This narrative is characteristic of the subversive power of Haitian folklore developed in response to the occupation. The stone containing the spirit of Papa Guede functions as a national symbol in the narrative. As Hurston explains, Papa Guede is the boisterous god of the Haitian peasants, and "nothing is quite so obvious as that this loa is the deification of the common people of Haiti." It belongs to the uneducated blacks, and "there is neither European nor African background f or it" ( Tell 219). As the "god of derision," "a spirit which could burlesque the society that crushed him," and a national(ist) icon, Guede--by urinating on the desk of a member of the occupying force--lends subversive political power to this seemingly innocent joke. This narrative reveals the peasants insubordinate responses against the occupation within the parameters of their own folk culture. In signifying on those more powerful, the peasants verbalize their largely suppressed desire for relief from the burdens of the occupation via their unusual interpretation of the events, and this "safe" expression reminds us that "the dominant never control the stage absolutely" (Scott 4).

Hurston cleverly links this narrative with the description of her encounter with a "black marine," a sergeant of the Garde d'Haiti who excels in swearing American style by interspersing his Creole with frequent exclamations of "Jesus Christ" and "God Damn!" Hurston points out that the legacy of the American Marines leads to a curious hybridity of language and of behavior, and she indirectly comments on the perverse cultural identification of the Haitian "black marine." Such native identification with the forces of the oppression reveals a sinister cultural adoption of violence when the "black marine" wants to prove his American identity by saying, "I am a black Marine. I speak like one always. Perhaps you would like me to kill something for you. I kill that dog for you....Jesus Christ! God Damn! I kill something" (137). By juxtaposing Haiti's mythological search for peace with aggressive foreign behavior, Hurston cleverly manipulates her readers to discover the irony of such linguistic and physical violence-- the legacy of the U.S. occupation. This ironic contrast not only brilliantly reveals the absurdities of occupational politics and their destructive influence on Haiti's population but also suggests that Hurston's own narrative strategy in Tell My Horse matches the fugitive political expressions of subordinate groups. Like the Haitian peasant population, who had to resort to disguising their ideological insubordination, the black American writer traditionally had to find her own ways of negotiating between dominant narratives and social critiques.

Possessing the Spirit: Voodoo as Cultural Resistance

As a rhetorical strategy of insubordination, Hurston's section on voodoo in Tell My Horse provides a critique of imperial claims to cultural and political "possession" of the Caribbean. By linking the colonial possession of Haiti and Jamaica to the voodoo worshipers' spiritual possession, Hurston represents black West Indians as part of an ambiguous signifying system: Historically and politically oppressed by Euro-American colonizers, they are not only victims but also masters of "possession." The performative function of spiritual possession in voodoo rituals "frees" Caribbean subjects from their colonial enslavement and imperial surveillance.

As a religion that developed in the context of slavery and colonialism, voodoo marks a fluid boundary between domination and resistance and defines a zone of struggle between public and private discourses of dominant and subordinate groups. Hurston's idea that voodoo functions as part of a private narrative is supported by the effort that public representatives of Haiti made to control, abolish, or deny it. James Scott explains that dominant groups (such as the Catholic Church) were afraid of the danger that autonomous sites of dissident religious practices could pose to public order. Hurston's observations that the churches were unsuccessfully trying to root out voodoo as a heresy prove that voodoo might indeed function as an insubordinate narrative in the form of a religion. By disrupting the didactic framework of Catholicism, voodoo in the Caribbean assumes the power of a subversive political act, endowing black Caribbeans with cultural memories and practices that are beyond the didactic control of public narratives. It is this "unruly" performative cultural element in Caribbean identity politics that fascinates Hurston in Tell My Horse. What Jamaica and Haiti "possess" is the resilience of spirit that in turn possesses the colonizers.

Hurston defines voodoo as primarily "a religion of creation and life," often misunderstood and "taken too literally" (113). Hurston's warning against taking voodoo "too literally" alludes to the idea that voodoo functions as a metaphor. Commenting on the interesting linguistic possibilities of voodoo, Joan Dayan convincingly argues that voodoo itself is a "fiction," or, as one Haitian intellectual explained to her, "Vodoun is an all powerful trope" (Dayan 35). Voodoo's varying significations in public and private narratives reveal a lack of stable truth "content," or meaning. Therefore, voodoo is best explained not as a literal but as a metaphorical concept, as Hurston astutely suggests. Joan Dayan encourages us to think about voodoo as a figurative concept:

In thinking about vodoun we must inhabit--even if risking that fashionable postmodern device--an indeterminate place, not vague so much as very particularlized in its many conversions. We must move to a middle ground where laws of identity and contradiction no longer work, where local and sometimes erratic gods summon and urge an insistent ideology or world of reference. (35)

Like Dayan, Houston A. Baker understands the "indeterminate place" of possession as a Derridian supplement. The term possession situates the writer who possesses the "gift" of language immediately in a diasporan context linking writing with the work of the spirit. "Being possessed," he explains, is more than a necessary doubling or inscribed 'otherness' of the con-scripted (those who come, as necessity, with writing). For in the diaspora, the possessed are governed not simply by script but also by productive conditions that render their entire play a tripling" (53). The plurality of possession's, and more generally voodoo's, significations--linguistic, religious, historical, and cultural--necessitates that it be reinvented every time, that it exist predominately as an ambiguous performance. [9]

The fact that voodoo itself resembles a linguistic performance does not empty it of its power to change Catholicism into a syncretic religion and to use spirit possession as a method for voicing subversive ideas. Hurston explains that the Haitian deities, or loa, are "not the Catholic calendar of saints done over in black" (114) and that each lithograph of a Catholic saint is not a representation but always an interpretation of a loa. Such pictures are, in Hurston's words, "only an approximation of the loa"(114), who cannot be seen but only experienced in the ritual of possession. Possession then is a particular kind of performance for a community of believers who witness the power of the spirit in and through the body of a human being:

He [the loa] manifests himself by "mounting" a subject as a rider mounts a horse, then he speaks and acts through his mount. The person mounted does nothing of his own accord. He is the horse of the loa until the spirit departs. Under the whip and guidance of the spirit-rider, the "horse" does and says many things that he or she would never have uttered un-ridden. (221)

In such forbidden utterances lies the political and revolutionary potential of spirit possession. According to Hurston, the phrase parlay cheval ou ('tell my horse') is used often and no doubt "as a blind for self -expression" (221). [10] James Scott concurs: "Subordinate groups have developed a large arsenal of techniques [including spirit possession] that serve to shield their identity while facilitating open criticism, threats, and attacks" (140). Because a possessed person is only a vehicle for a higher being, spirit possession provides the protection of anonymity and can be a "safe" expression of dangerous hostility. Scott refers to I. M. Lewis, who argues persuasively that "spirit possession in many societies represents a quasi-covert form of social protest for women and for marginal, oppressed groups of men for whom any open protest would be exceptionally dangerous" (Scott 141). Lewis grants that "ritualized rebellion" and expressions of insubordination might not "represent a completely satisfying cath arsis [,] which totally exhausts pent-up resentment and frustration" of the underprivileged (11), but possession as protest certainly works within limits. It is a liberating mechanism by which frustration and anger may be voiced with impunity.

If possession is a liberating performance, what about the equestrian metaphor that turns the Haitian believer into a horse? Experts explain that metaphors of mounting and riding are not perceived as a matter of domination but as a movement of spiritual expansion during which a loa dances in the head of a believer and enlarges his or her soul. [11] Spirit possession as a voodoo ritual is also less an individual act and more a communal event, in which "the possessed gives herself up to become an instrument in a social and collective drama" (Dayan 40). Joseph Murphy explains the reciprocity between community and spirit: "Diasporan ceremonies are thus services for the spirit, actions of sacrifice and praise to please the spirit. And they are services of the spirit, actions undertaken by the spirit to inspire the congregation" (7). As services of the spirit, voodoo rituals and spirit possession were perceived by those in power as "an alarming plot" (Murphy 13).

Historically, spirit possession was very important in the construction of diasporan communities because these rituals provided an opportunity for colonized peoples to remain in touch with each other and their African ancestors. Particularly in Haiti of the eighteenth century, African cultural memory was rather recent because during slavery it was easier to import African slaves to Haiti than to battle the mortality rate of the local Creoles (Davis, Passage 25). During the nineteenth century, after the revolution, Haiti's relative cultural isolation contributed to the formation of communities with strong African patterns. Through these historical circumstances, voodoo is intricately linked to slavery, displacement, and African cultural memory. The Middle Passage produced communities of belief that were different from traditional Western beliefs because they remembered their African gods. Hurston reports that, at least in thought, black Haitians return to an irretrievable place of origin called "Guinee," which is believed to be under the water: "There is a great belief in a land beneath the waters. Some say it is not beneath the waters, but one must pass through the waters to get there" (Tell 234). However one may reach the gods, it is cultural memory that links members of voodoo societies.

In the colonial context, spirit worship brought oppressed communities together in religious gatherings that provided a way for slaves to meet, exchange news, share grief, and unite. As a religion, voodoo was indeed a critical force against the external authority of French colonial and American imperial powers. In his preface to Tell My Horse, Ishmael Reed explains that voodoo "has been the inspiration for the major slave revolts in this hemisphere, including the one that ousted the French from Haiti" (xiii). And according to Wade Davis, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, voodoo became what some call "the single most critical unifying factor in the impending struggle of the revolutionary slaves" (Passage 225). Leaders of the Haitian revolution like Jean Francois, Biassou, Jeannot, and Toussaint l'Overture all used voodoo ceremonies for their slave uprisings. C. L. R. James believes that, when l'Overture began organizing thousands of untrained insurgents in 1792, voodoo rites were crucial in readying the troops for the fights. These "preliminary manceuvre," he says, included the involvement of black priests and women, chants of "the wanga," and frantic dancing. "When these had reached the necessary height of excitement the fighters attacked" (James 117). Such historical reconstructions are necessarily hypothetical, as Patrick Taylor correctly reminds us, but Taylor concurs with James: "The evidence suggests that voudou did play an important role in the revolution" (111). By uniting oppressed subjects, voodoo helped to free Caribbeans from their colonial enslavement and to create independent communities.

Hurston, who was very interested in communities that resisted oppression, visited the maroons at Accompong when she was in Jamaica. This group of maroons formed an isolated, independent settlement of an estimated 1,000 people. As a citizen of one of the first independent black towns in America, Hurston clearly was attracted to this community of former slaves, who successfully resisted all attempts to re-enslave them. As an anthropologist, Hurston was excited because the maroons represented "exactly the kind of isolated community many folklorists hope to discover" (Hemenway 229). Hurston was particularly curious about their "primitive medicines" because such "medicines," or more precisely vegetable poisons. played a major role in Haitian resistance movements. [12]

Hurston's comments about the self-governing maroon communities are also interesting for the split identification they reveal. On the one hand, Hurston (as a black woman) identifies with the plight and destiny of free maroon societies. On the other hand, she regards these communities from the standpoint of an American ethnographer who comments on their "primitive" lifestyles:

Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica. And yet as I stood there looking into the sea beyond Black River from the mountains of St. Catherine, and looking at the thatched huts close at hand, I could not help remembering that a whole civilization and the mightiest nation on earth had grown up on the mainland since the first runaway slave had taken refuge in these mountains. (22)

This conflict between black cultural identification and national identification is Hurston's dilemma as a black American ethnographer. The passage reveals that her pride in the racial heritage of the maroons is checked and countered by her pride in the progress of her American "homeland." Racial and national identifications are at odds here, and again produce a tension between patriotic discourses of American nationalism and nativist discourses of black liberation. By commenting about an/other society, Hurston is exposing her assumptions about the meaning of "civilization" and her own alienation from both cultural contexts. She experiences not only Caribbean identities as "others" but herself as an "Other."

Trinh Minh-ha explains that any anthropologist experiences a threefold alienation: first, from her own culture and society; second, in the choice of her profession; and, third, in relation to those whom she studies (58). This must have been particularly true for Hurston, a minority anthropologist who occupied marginal positions in both American and Haitian society, and who was a woman in a predominately male discipline.13 This conflict between racial and national identifications remains essentially unresolved throughout Tell My Horse, although a close reading reveals that the narrative is frequently punctured by indirect, metaphorical celebrations of ethnic identities. Take Hurston's encounter with a maroon "medicine man," for instance, which forms a "conclusion" to her visit with the maroon society at Accompong. This medicine man--who can silence all the croaking frogs just by the power of this will--functions as a crucial symbol testifying to the unusual strength of this community and its unbroken will pow er.

The maroon communities forcefully illustrate that, though forced into secrecy, the culture of the colonized possesses great powers. Having achieved both emancipation and independence, these communities have retained their form as dissident subcultures, partly in an effort to avoid surveillance and social control. As a political and symbolic concept, maroonage is a particularly useful concept for the study of black culture and literature. Houston Baker argues that critical "maroonage" comments metaphorically on the power of the transgressive "black text." He draws an analogy between runaway slave communities for whom guerilla warfare was very much part of life and African American writers who convert maroonage warfare into fiction and songs. [14] Following Baker's lead, I suggest that in writing about Jamaica and Haiti, Hurston also employs a strategy of "creative maroonage" when she adopts strategies of masking, inversion, and ironic juxtaposition by fusing public with private discourses and patriotic imperi alism with black globalism.

The Global Spirit of Trans-African Identities

As we have seen, Hurston's investigation of Caribbean identities leads to tensions between colonizer and colonized, the United States and the Caribbean. These tensions structure Tell My Horse because Hurston identifies alternately with the colonizing force of her "home country," the United States, and the folk resistance of the colonial subjects. By focusing on spirit possession as a strategy for resistance, Hurston not only recognizes the potential for liberation, but she also establishes cultural connections among African, Caribbean, and black Southern cultures. What links the American South with the Caribbean and Africa is its history of slavery and colonialism. Hurston's work on black Southern folk culture in Mules and Men (1935) and her travels in the Caribbean prompted her understanding of what might be termed black cultural globalism. [15] By extending her research on folklore and voodoo from the Southern United States into the Caribbean Basin, Hurston articulates a cultural continuum that stretches f rom West Africa through the Caribbean into the black American South.

The West African and trans-Caribbean influences in the South are best seen in spiritual ceremonies that evoke elements from voodoo rituals. In "The Sanctified Church," an essay written in the early 1930s, Hurston emphasizes cultural links between the black churches of the South and spirit worship in the Caribbean and West Africa. The Sanctified Church, which developed as a movement against "high-brow protestantism," as Hurston explains, shares many characteristics with the voodoo services of the peasants in Haiti. Hurston notices that both forms of worship associate rhythm, sound, and motion with religion. The deep African undercurrent of black Baptist religions provides a way of linking Southern culture with African and Caribbean cultures. In fact, Hurston suggests that "the Negro [in the U.S.] has not been christianized as extensively as is generally believed. The great masses are still standing before their pagan altars and calling old gods by a new name" (Sanctified 103). Because this act of renaming has not eradicated the cultural and religious repository of a trans-African ancestral past, the American colonial project has not achieved the conversion of its subjected peoples. Hurston argues that linguistic displacement of pagan names with Christian names has not resulted in religious and cultural "purity" but in complex performances of religious hybridity and cultural masking. In fact, many performative elements of the Southern black church are reminiscent of trans-African traditions of worship.

Hurston defines the service of the Sanctified Churches as "drama with music" and "something that approaches dancing" (104). The same performance aspect is present in and essential to ceremonies she witnessed in Haiti and in the American South. Joseph Murphy explains that "the linkage of music and movement with the presence of the spirit, while neither an exclusively diasporan way of worship, nor inclusive of all black people, is a distinguishable, important tradition among a great variety of people of African descent in the Americas" (5). In Hurston's words, through the introduction of music and movement, "the congregation is restored to its primitive altars under the new name of Christ." Particularly the "shouting" element of some black services are, in Hurston's opinion, "nothing more than a continuation of the African 'Possession' by the gods," who "possess the body of the worshiper and he or she is supposed to know nothing of their actions until the god decamps. This is still prevalent in most Negro prot estant churches and is universal in the Sanctified churches" (104).

Because possession blurs the distinctions between and it produces not sell-sameness but self-difference and is, like "shouting," a performance of linguistic multiplicity. Music, drama, possession, and dance are those "elements which were brought over from Africa and grafted onto Christianity as soon as the Negro came in contact with it" (105). African American scholars of religion confirm Hurston's observations. Albert Raboteau suggests that "perhaps the most obvious continuity between African and Afro-American religions is the style of the performance in ritual action." He lists "drumming, singing[,] and dancing" as "essential features of African and Afro-American liturgical expression [which] are crucial to the ceremonial possession of cult members by their gods" (Slave 35). In the services of the Sanctified Church, Hurston also finds evidence of spirit possession: "Even the definite African 'Possession' attitudes of dancing mostly on one foot and stumbling about to a loose rhythm is attempted. These same steps can be seen in Haiti when a man or a woman is 'mounted' by a loa, or spirit" (107). Raboteau stresses the importance of this ritual for the voodoo ceremony: "In Haiti, as in Africa and elsewhere in the Caribbean, possession by the loa, or mystere, as they are called, is the climax of the voudou ritual" (Slave 27). Such similarities exist because trans-African cultures share religions which are rooted in the social history of enslavement and racial discrimination. Joseph Murphy explains that "each tradition became the focus for an extraordinary struggle for survival against and triumph over brutal systems of exploitation. They share an elevated sense of solidarity against injustice and a commitment to the protection and advancement of their communities" (2). According to Raboteau, even today, black churches in the U.S. continue to provide this important sense of community and security, as well as a "significant sense of continuity with the past" (Fire 103).

Hurston realized early that spirit possession is a valuable cultural practice that provides the clues both to a Haitian national identity and to a global trans-African identity. With Haiti under new native leadership, Hurston predicted that voodoo would play a central, public role in the cultural and political life of the island. Hurston sensed that

a feeling of nationalism is growing in Haiti among the young. They admire France less and less, and their own native patterns more. They are contending that Voodoo is not what is wrong with Haiti. The thing fettering the country is its politics and those foreign [French and Belgian Catholic] priests. (Tell 92)

By highlighting the role of voodoo as part of a strategy of liberation and national identification, Hurston links voodoo intricately to both political and cultural resistance against colonial and imperial "possession" of the Caribbean by Europe and America. Hurston predicted that, in the wake of the nineteen-year occupation, the future cultural orientation of the majority of Haitians would turn toward Africa, rather than Europe or America.

No matter whether her predictions came true, Hurston was interested in exploring and articulating a dialectic of black belief systems in order to create a trans-national understanding of African/American culture. In a time of heightened nationalism and with the international rise of fascism, Hurston was not unaffected by American protectionism abroad. But, she was also working on articulating a global vision of black cultures. By comparing voodoo with Southern Protestantism, Hurston challenges Americans' assumptions about their own culture. Hurston's research questions the "us"-"them" dichotomy that existed between the United States and the Caribbean by presenting voodoo not in contrast with European-derived religions, but as a syncretic trans-national form of worship. Finally, as a writer who considered herself not only "amply equipped to go out in the field" to study possession (252), but who also possessed the power of language, Hurston understood that voodoo served to marginalize Caribbean and African American cultures; therefore, she countered such political discourses with her discoveries about the global presence of spirit possession.

Annette Trefzer received her Ph.D. from Tulane University and is currently Assistant Professor of English at the University of Mississippi, where she teaches Southern literature and critical theory. She is the author of several articles on Zora Neale Hurston and the co-editor of Reclaiming Native American Cultures.

Notes

(1.) See for instance J. Michael Dash's analysis in the second edition of Haiti and the United States (60) and Robert Hemenway's critique of Hurston's "American chauvinism" (249).

(2.) Wendy Dutton points out that Tell My Horse is a work much ahead of its time in its attempt to blend different textual forms and disciplines.

(3.) Franz Boas's anthropological theories are sometimes called "cultural relativism." Boas believed that the cultural investigator should "free himself from all valuations based on our own culture." In Anthropology and Modern Life, he wrote: "An objective, strictly scientific inquiry can be made only if we succeed in entering into each culture on its own basis" (205). As early as 1928, Boas recognized and acknowledged the tendency toward ethnocentricity and cultural bias involved in reporting about other cultures, and he expressed hope for the ethnographer's "emancipation" from her own cultural values.

(4.) About geographical cultural affiliation and the creation of trans-cultural spaces, see also Paul Gllroy's The Black Atlantic and Joseph Roach's Cities of the Dead.

(5.) Robert Farris Thompson reminds us that voodoo has mostly been superficially understood by Westemers since the eighteenth century. In fact, voodoo has been "reviled as abominable primitivism and vulgarized and exploited in countless racist books and films" (163).

(6.) Hurston's extensive work on voodoo has largely escaped scholarly notice, with the exception of Wade Davis's anthropological work and articles by Barbara Speisman, Ellease Southerland, Wendy Dutton, and John Lowe.

(7.) Richard Wright's membership in the Communist Party is perhaps the most famous example of such tensions.

(8.) Hurston evokes William Seabrook's narrative The Magic Island (1929) not only in spirit but also with a direct reference to his work.

(9.) The term performance here should not mean that the possession is "fake" but that it bears elements of the performative. Alfred Metraux argues that there are similarities between possession and theater, but in the eyes of the believers the possessed person is never an actor (127). For Michelle Anderson, the voodoo ritual is like theater in the sense that both activities fuse illusion and reality: "Both kinds of performance illuminate the ambiguities surrounding the concept of authenticity" (89).

(10.) Alfred Metraux in his influential book Voodoo in Haiti explains that the equestrian terminology used to describe spirit possession comes from the possessed individual's wild behavior, which resembles the "bucking of a wild horse, who feels the weight of a rider on his back" (122).

(11.) See Joan Dayan on this point (40) and Alfred Metraux (120).

(12.) See Wade Davis and Patrick Taylor on Macadam, a maroon leader who led a slave rebellion against white slave owners in 1752.

(13.) Hurston's pen writes the slippery language of the anthropologist throughout Tell My Horse. According to Trinh Minh-ha, the anthropologist's language "reveals its power through an insignificant slip of the pen, for no matter how one tries to subject it to control and reduce it to 'pure' instrumentality, it always succeeds in giving an inkling of its irreducible governing status" (58).

(14.) Houston Baker cites Richard Price's work on maroon societies and argues that Price's understanding of maroonage closely corresponds to the works of black American writers such as Alain Locke (76).

(15.) I wish to thank Kenneth Mostern for initiating a discourse about globalism in the African American context and for sharing his ideas.

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