1 Repossessing the Slave Past: Caribbean Historiography and Dennis Scotts An Echo in the Bone John Thieme

The potential of a country is the mass of its people. (Derek Walcott, Drums and Colours1) During the 1990s I worked in Hull, where in the Old Town the iconic presence of William Wilberforce looms large. Wilberforce sits atop the citys equivalent of Nelsons Column and the Wilberforce House in cobbled High Street, now very much a back street, has been the home to a museum, which, for a century, has curated the story of Atlantic slavery and the work of Wilberforce and his associates in the campaign to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire. Hulls museums have strong proletarian traditions. The Old Grammar School, where Andrew Marvell and Wilberforce were once pupils, houses an exhibition of The Story of Hull and Its Peoples that devotes most of its space to a narrative of the social history of the city, memorializing the lives of its ordinary inhabitants rather than such luminaries as Marvell and Wilberforce. However, not surprisingly, the Wilberforce House Museum, the finest and best-preserved seventeenth-century residence in Hull, has been concerned with chronicling the life of the single most important figure in the abolitionist struggle. Until recently it offered a two-part story of slavery. Visitors were exposed to the horrors and brutality of the trade and the conditions on New World plantations, particularly through a gruesome threedimensional mock-up of the hold of a Middle Passage ship, complete with sound effects in the form of the groans of slaves. Then, after this journey through trauma, they progressed into a more redemptive narrative, viewing exhibits that illustrated

2 ways in which Wilberforce and his Evangelical contemporaries pursued their campaign to eradicate the trade. To commemorate the bicentenary of abolition, the museums exhibits have been expanded as part of a development project that has redirected emphasis by highlighting the African perspective and exploring contemporary issues. This change of focus seems salutary. One does not want to dispute the abolitionist narrative, simply to say that, if history rewrites the present, shifting the emphasis, so that the story is told from the side of those who were the victims of one of the most inhumane episodes in world history provides a more appropriate perspective. It would be invidious if commemorating the bicentenary privileged abolition at the expense of the horrors that occurred. Serious narratives of other unspeakable chapters in human history, such as the Holocaust have not generally placed their main stress on the forces that brought them to an end and in this respect the historiography of slavery runs the risk of being exceptional, even if popular representations of other genocides, including films such as The Killing Fields (1984), Schindlers List (1993) and Hotel Rwanda (2004), have centred their attention on individual stories of rescue. Down the road from the Georgian Wilberforce House, there is another historical building: a modest back-street pub called Ye Olde Black Boy. It dates from the early eighteenth century, but its history is less well documented. It became a pub in the twentieth century, after reputedly having previously been a coffee house and a brothel. The provenance of the pubs name is particularly uncertain. Although a major port from the medieval period onwards, Hull, unlike Liverpool and Bristol, was not a terminus for the triangular trade; facing East, its commerce was mainly with mainland Europe. So, while the presence of a single real-life black boy is very conceivable, the name would seem to attest to a different situation from those in the

3 West coast ports. Hull is a town which, despite the Wilberforce legacy, has historically been more monocultural than most British cities, albeit a location in which European migrants have frequently shored up. What is known about the black boy? One theory has it that he was a Moroccan, who worked in the building when it was a coffee house in the eighteenth century. The rest is rumour and prominent among the rumours is a popular tradition that the pub is haunted. So, altogether less celebrated than the Wilberforce House, the pub is nevertheless something of a heritage site in itself, but it attests to a history of silence, anecdote and rumour. A silence which perhaps haunts the very well-documented, humanitarian work of William Wilberforce. The restaging of the Wilberforce House exhibits is thankfully going some way to remedying the occlusion of the African side of the story and in this essay I should like to consider work by Caribbean dramatists, which also re-envisions slave-related experiences in ways that suggest the inadequacy of the abolitionist narrative unless it is complemented by an engagement with the African legacy. After some brief remarks on Derek Walcotts 1993 Walker, originally a libretto set in nineteenthcentury Boston, my main focus is on Dennis Scotts 1974 play, An Echo in the Bone, which develops a brilliant strategy to demonstrate how the slave past permeates its twentieth-century Jamaican present. The task of recuperating the silenced voices of historys dispossessed is, of course, never easy and sometimes nigh-on impossible; and in this case the clich that history is written by the victors is an understatement, since the victims of the trade and plantation slavery seldom had any access to the written word at all, unless, like Olaudah Equiano, Ukawsaw Gronniosaw and Phillis Wheatley, their writing was used to argue the abolitionist case. And even today, at this bicentennial moment, the story

4 of African slavery continues to be told in tandem with accounts of abolition which, not unreasonably given their focus, accord equal space to British reformers. In Murray Wattss acclaimed recent play African Snow (2007),2 for example, Equiano is thrown into dialogue with John Newton, the reformed slave-trader, who in later life assisted Wilberforce and is now best remembered as the composer of the hymn Amazing Grace. Newton is another abolitionist whose memory has been only too well curated by a British museum, the Cowper and Newton Museum in Olney. Equiano less so? Not altogether. He, too, has been given a voice, then and now, but primarily as a vicarious, iconic spokesman for his mute African contemporaries and in a context that has been dependent on the work of the abolitionists. When the slaves and the freed diasporic Africans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were literate, the pressure to comply with the gradualist tactics favoured by many white abolitionists often led to a dilution of their protests. Derek Walcott dramatizes their dilemma in Walker, originally a libretto commissioned by the Boston Athenaeum for an opera by T.J. Anderson and subsequently revised as a play with music by Walcotts long-time collaborator Galt MacDermot.3 The first scene of Walker includes a dialogue between the historical figures of its hero, the black abolitionist David Walker, and the Irish abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Set at Thanksgiving in 1830, in the years between the abolition of the trade in the U.S. (in 1808) and Emancipation, this dialogue debates the relative merits of gradualist and militant approaches to ending slavery. Garrison counsels the literate and highly articulate Walker against publishing what he sees as a seditious text,4 while a chorus locates Walkers vision in the context of such African American pathfinders as the painters Jacob Lawrence, Horace Pippin and Romare Bearden as work in the true American grain.5 Walker is at its most effective in stylized passages such as the

5 following, which underline the revolutionary potential of black print as a means for voicing African retentions in the snow-white world of Boston: I was walking alone through a forest of black trees whose leaves were like print, but their language was different and the leaves were letters I had learnt but forgotten from the African kingdoms, and I was lost and not lost. [] I was remembering an alphabet from a language I did not know, then I looked outside the window and the drums no longer beat, and saw Boston smothered in snow [].6 The emphasis on the scribal in passages like this clearly speaks to the continued need to give voice to African American experience as part of the fight against slavery in the period after the abolition of the trade. Walcotts Walker is silenced apparently poisoned to collect a bounty placed on his head, as, rumour has it, he was in real life7 but the dramatic reconstruction of his last hours revives and articulates his uncompromising message and ultimately Garrison is no more than a bit-player in a production that places Walker centre-stage. With literacy comparatively rare among the slaves in the southern American states and the anglophone Caribbean, orally transmitted histories became the main conduits for preserving, transforming and revivifying African-derived cultural practices. However, these potent storehouses of ancestral memories more frequently functioned as repositories of communal strength and survival rather than as testimonies to the atrocities of the slave trade and slavery. In the mid twentiethcentury Caribbean, the era in which Walcott and Dennis Scott were coming of age, slavery remained the unspoken Ur-narrative of Afro-Caribbean life, as well as a crucial sub-text underlying the experience of Caribbean peoples of other ethnicities. George Lamming highlights the omission of slavery from the late colonial educational

6 curriculum in a memorable passage in his first novel, In the Castle of My Skin (1953). A group of colonial schoolboys find it hard to believe that slavery ever existed in Barbados. [Queen Victoria] was a great and good queen, the head teacher had said, and the old people had said something similar. [] They said she made us free, you and me and him and you. [] It was disturbing. The thought of not being free. [] An old woman said that once they were slaves, but now they were free. And she said thats what the good and great queen had done. She had made them free. [] [A small boy] asked the teacher what was the meaning of slave, and the teacher explained. But it didnt make sense. He didnt understand how anyone could be bought by another. He knew horses and dogs could be bought and worked. But he couldnt understand how one man could buy another man. [] People talked of slaves a long time ago. It had nothing to do with the old lady. She wouldnt be old enough. And moreover it had nothing to do with people in Barbados. No one there was ever a slave, the teacher said. It was in another part of the world that those things happened. Not in Little England.8 Little England may have been an extreme case and clearly Lammings response is all too aware of both the erasure of slavery in the colonial school curriculum and the brainwashing that has led to the emphasis on Emancipation in the collective memory represented by the old woman. Nevertheless the major concerns of In the Castle of My Skin have more to do with mid twentieth-century decolonization than the historical legacy of slavery and in this respect Lamming is only too typical of the independence generation of Caribbean writers, who were both shaped by, and in most cases came to write against, the late colonial cultural climate in which they grew up. In the plays of both African and Caribbean dramatists of the independence generation, there is a recurrent trope that seems to relate to the stifling of independent consciousness in the colonial era: it is the figure of a half-born or mute subject, used to express the need to give voice to silenced discourses. Wole Soyinka introduces the character of a half-child, based on the traditional Yoruba figure of the abiku,9 into his play A Dance of the Forests (first performed at the time of Nigerian Independence in 1960) in a manner that suggests the earlier suppression of an embryonic

7 independent consciousness. Prior to this, Walcott had concluded his play Ti-Jean and His Brothers (1957), which has attracted interpretation as an allegory of the development of a post-colonial sensibility,10 with the coming into life of a bolom, or unborn foetus.11 Mutes also people the pages of several post-colonial novels, appearing for example in the figure of Simon in Keri Hulmes The Bone People (1983) and J.M. Coetzees Friday in Foe (1986). In both these cases the novelists decline to speak for their silent protagonists or to explain the origins of their dumbness. In contrast, Scotts An Echo in the Bone, which also includes a mute character, Rattler, lays bare the cause of his voicelessness. Rattler has had his tongue sliced by slavers, an action that seems to serve as a metonym for the silencing of the dispossessed slaves more generally and which the plays revisionist historiography contests through a highly effective use of the aural resources of theatre. First staged by the Drama Society of the University of the West Indies Mona (Jamaica) campus in May 1974, An Echo in the Bone is centrally concerned with issues of ownership and possession, particularly the question of who owns and can relate history. At one point a white character cites Bryan Edwardss History of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1793),12 an influential text in the period prior to abolition which promulgated a view of Caribbean history that opposed the abolitionist lobby. It strikes a discordant note in Scotts play, which employs a complex dramatic structure that re-imagines various moments in the history of slavery and its aftermath from a subaltern point of view and relates them to its contemporary twentieth-century action, set in 1937. At the opening of the play the smallholder Crew has gone missing, after having murdered the estate owner Mr Charles. Crew is dead, but when his son Sonson assumes his role in scenes that reveal what has happened in the days immediately preceding the opening, he is unambiguous not only in asserting the

8 centrality of his right to the land, but also the significance of this in historical terms as part of a process of emancipation and the maintenance of ancestral continuity: I know every step of it. Every bush; like the back of me hand. Is a history behind every foot of it. [] I dont have nothing except what I get from the ground. I born by it and marry by it and one day it going to kill me. Maybe even now, but is what I know, it is what nothing can change. I trying to tell you, and I dont have the word to tell you, I am like a dumb man trying to tell you what happen to him. I can only trace the line here in the hard dirt, see? And the line going from here to there, and this end is where them bring my great grandfather, here, and this is me. If you take away the line from the ground I am nothing. I am nobody! [] It is everything! Everything! [] My father and his father sweat for it, year after year. It is my birthright that say I am not a slave anymore. (Echo 128) In 1970, at a time shortly after the more heavily populated Caribbean nations had attained their independences (Jamaica in 1962), Scott who had received awards at the Jamaica festival literary competitions in the 1960s, expressed the view, when an ex-slave society imposes discipline on itself from within, it begins to wipe out a tradition of submission. [] It is the beginning of a freedom to choose13 and the specific choice that he made in An Echo in the Bone was to renegotiate the terms of Jamaican historiography, by restaging episodes from the past within the context of the Afro-Caribbean rite of the Nine Night. Like wakes in many other cultures, the Nine Night is a form that transcends the mourning aspects of funeral customs to celebrate and release the dead persons spirit.14 As such it has some affinity with the musical performances of New Orleans jazz funerals, where the solemn music of the procession to the cemetery and during the burial itself gives way to upbeat, celebratory music (such as When the Saints Go Marching In) after it has taken place. Olive Senior explains Nine Night as an: Old folk custom which is still observed in many parts of Jamaica. It is similar to a wake [] details of the nine night ceremony vary from place to place in Jamaica. Basically it is a ceremony held on the ninth night after death at the home of the deceased. The idea is to give the dead person a good departure from this world. It is believed that unless this is done, his spirit or duppy will

9 hang around to haunt the living. [] Although nine night in its various forms is held to fulfill a specific function it has also served as the means of preserving a great deal of Jamaican folk culture as this is manifested in songs, fames, riddles, stories, etc.15 Scotts choice of the Nine Night as the fulcrum on which his play turns is, however, far from straightforward. In addition to dramatizing the rite, he draws on what Senior identifies as its anthologizing role as a preserver of folk culture and he specifically associates it with spirit-possession religions such as myal and pocomania. As in the work of Caribbean writers such as Kamau Brathwaite and Erna Brodber, his emphasis on possession involves more than one meaning of the word.16 To be possessed is to be taken over by the creolized African elements in Caribbean culture and to claim ownership of ones history, land and language and most importantly ones birthright that say I am not a slave anymore. In Renu Junejas words: The use of the Nine-Night ceremony is, of course, a brilliant theatrical choice. Because the phenomenon of spirit possession is central to this ceremony, Scott is able to multiply his cast of characters to take us back to the past effectively and economically to selected episodes without making the action appear disjointed or incoherent.17 The brilliance of the theatrical choice operates in other ways too, since it allows Scott to reverse those Western casting conventions that sanctioned Oliviers playing Othello in blackface, legitimizing what Caryl Phillips has referred to as a procession of sunblotched Oliver Hardy lookalikes waddling across the English stage 18 who have played the Moor. Scotts note on the staging of the play makes it clear that All characters are black (Echo 75) and, although this is literally true of the parts the actors play in the present action, the historical scenes contain numerous white characters whose identities are now appropriated by the ensemble cast of black players. In short, in a strategic reversal of common (albeit far from universal) Western casting conventions, the ownership of the dramatis personae of An Echo in the Bone is to be entirely in the hands of a black cast.

10 Junejas comments on the significance of possession in An Echo in the Bone continue by outlining its importance in relation to history: [I]t is also the most appropriate choice in terms of the history that Scott is making or remaking because it signals at the outset that history is a possession of the black people and very different from the sanctioned colonial accounts. The Nine-Night ceremony is a cultural survival from the African past. The ceremony is associated with Pocomania [] a syncretist religion responsive to the needs of the black populace [which] partakes of the ancestor possession cults of the Ashanti. [] The Nine-Night ceremony, then, is not only evidence of cultural continuities with Africa but is also associated with direct political resistance. There are other associations with this possession by spirits of the dead which make the ritual a particularly appropriate vehicle for recreating history. The dead tell the truth.19 Whether Nine Night is always associated with pocomania (pukumina) in quite the way that Juneja suggests is questionable, but certainly her emphasis on the dramatic use of possession foregrounds the central theme of An Echo in the Bone. The play connects the slave history of the Caribbean with the recent personal history of its small group of rural Jamaican characters through its emphasis on ownership. And the use of a rite which anthologizes a range of Jamaican folk forms at its centre does work brilliantly in dramatic terms, since it allows for a new performance of the past, in which the apparent fixity of Caribbean historiography is refashioned by being restaged in a context that allows history to be creatively reconstructed. Given that the official historiography of the Caribbean has been dominated by written accounts that have at best provided a partial and partisan version of the past, as seen from the point of view of those who have had author-ity, an alternative historical praxis needs to develop strategies that subvert or sidestep this record. Scotts choice of a dramatic form based on folk custom provides an ideal vehicle for such imaginative reenvisioning. In one of his most famous essays Derek Walcott has written of the need to escape from the determinism inherent in most approaches to the Caribbeans history

11 of slavery. Walcott argues that it is necessary to wipe the slate clean, to escape from servitude to the muse of history, which has produced a literature of recrimination and despair, a literature of revenge written by the descendants of slaves or a literature of remorse written by the descendants of masters.20 Scott takes a different view in dramatizing the need to go back to the past and give voice to the silenced, in order to transform what will otherwise remain a crippling legacy. He achieves this through a complex set of variations on the transformative power of role-playing. Drama becomes the medium through which the past can be imaginatively re-enacted, so that scenes from the culturally encoded discourse of colonial historiography are given a completely different inflection. Even the plays use of theatrical space functions to suggest the possibilities of metamorphosing received versions of history. The set is an old sugar barn. Scotts note on staging suggests the need to economise on props and scene changes, along with ways in which the present is permeated by the slave past and the Middle Passage: Objects present in the beginning of the play (i.e. the present) may be used as substitutes for props in scenes from the past. Similarly, the set should provide playing areas needing a minimum of resetting to suggest the various places of the action. The barn is large, with thick but deteriorating walls, and anonymous articles of rusting metals creating a feeling of age and disuse. Perhaps the ceiling slopes. Four huge girders rusting, support the roof and its gaping holes. The stage is dominated by a huge chain that is looped to the roof in two places, falling to the ground in coils past a broken shelf of wood a few feet across, on one side and ending in mid-air on the other. (Echo, 75) So, just as the various roles assumed by the plays ten characters are expedient for production purposes, as they avoid the need to have a vast cast, the potential problems inherent in producing a play with multiple scenes are neatly solved by the transformative use of a single setting. In both cases stage directions that facilitate economic performance dovetail neatly with the plays stress on the interpenetration of present and past. As An Echo in the Bone develops, the small repertory of actors take

12 on completely different roles in scenes set in 1792, 1820, 1833, 1834, as well as four years earlier and in the days immediately preceding the Nine Night. Similarly, the rusting girders and the chain become a backdrop for a harrowing scene set aboard a slave ship, again suggesting continuities across the centuries and particularly that the corrosive legacy of the slave past frustrates the possibility of attaining total freedom in the post-Emancipation present. Continuities between past and present are repeatedly evoked through recurrent motifs such as vendors cries, drumbeats and references to the killing of a wild boar. There is also a persistent emphasis on the way that black subjectivity has been dehumanized, with the use of animal tropes in the speech of Europeans in a scene set on the Guinea Coast in 1792 being echoed and contested in the words of Crews daughter-in-law, Brigit, in an episode set four years before the contemporary action. Brigit says: Black people used to work this land for nothing and they used to treat them like beast, they could amount them anytime. I not breeding for any man just because of pleasure. I is not an animal. I is a human being (Echo 115). Similarly, the conviction that little has changed across the centuries is repeatedly asserted during the play. Sonson takes the view that from slavery days them dont change (Echo 112), an opinion shared by the ironmonger Stone, who says that nothing has changed since two hundred years ago, when all of us worked the land for nothing, like animals (Echo 109). Unlike Walcott, then, Scott is intent on reinvoking the trauma of slavery and insisting on the continuing impact of its legacy on twentieth-century Caribbean society, but his decision to set the present action of a play first performed in the postindependence period in the 1930s is arguably significant. The thirties was a decade in which there were riots and strikes in several parts of the Caribbean, particularly Jamaica and Trinidad, and, although the plays microcosm is never related to these

13 public events, setting it in a period when the forces that would make independence inevitable were taking shape is highly appropriate. At the same time, if history rewrites the present, the events depicted would seem to have had relevance for the 1970s in Scotts eyes; and given that the earlier historical scenes are all set within a fairly short period, in years (1792 to 1834) before and after the abolition of the trade, the play continues to have resonances that echo into our bicentennial moment. These resonances include Scotts insistence on revisiting the horrors of slavery, demonstrating the interpenetration of past and present and asserting ordinary Jamaicans claims to the ownership of history. All of this is integral to the plays movement and resolution, but the ending goes further in positing a response to the trauma of the slave past. There is little mystery surrounding Crews murder of Mr Charles. This is a given from the outset; only the details of means and motive are withheld. It comes as little surprise to the audience to find out that his action has been instigated by a dispute over land rights: Crew has gone to see Mr Charles after a river has been diverted, effectively depriving him of his livelihood, since without irrigation farming his smallholding is no longer sustainable. The impetus to approach the estate owner comes when his wife Rachel (who unbeknown to him has slept with Mr Charles four years before) tells him that she is going to work as a housekeeper in the Great House to support them. Crew, played by Sonson in the imagined re-enactment of what has happened, naively believes that Mr Charles will understand how a man like me feel about the land and [] will listen (Echo 128). The play builds towards climax in an expressionistic scene in which he approaches the estate house, making his way through a taunting chorus of whispering white voices. Predictably Mr Charles (played by Stone) is unreceptive to his complaint and tells him to go to the

14 back door and wait. At this point the action freeze[s] (Echo 131) with Crew raising the murder weapon, his machete, above Mr Charles. If An Echo in the Bone ended here, it might be possible to see it as simply adopting an opposite position to Walcott in The Muse of History, to view it as a theatrical articulation of a literature of revenge written by the descendants of slaves. It has used the Nine Night to dramatize episodes illustrating the atrocities of slavery and at this point it attracts sympathy for Crews anticipated act of violence, which both expresses his devotion to the land and contests the historical dispossession of his people. Earlier scenes, such as the slitting of Rattlers tongue, have borne witness to their discursive as well as their social deprivation, and the play has staked a claim to the ownership of history. It does not, however, end, depicting a polarized view of culture and society in its present-day situation. Despite the freezing of the action, there is no real doubt that Crew has murdered Mr Charles and is dead himself, but like the earlier historical scenes this past event is re-enacted during the course of the Nine Night. Sonsons playing of the part of Crew opens up the possibility of an alternative version of this event. Sonson and his younger brother Jacko represent contrasting responses in both the present and past actions of the play. In an episode set in 1833 they are Maroons, who take very different attitudes to their situation: Sonson favours violent rebellion against the regime; Jacko prefers to remain apart from colonial Jamaican society in the Maroons isolated hill encampments. In the 1930s action they occupy similar positions and the episode set four years before the Nine Night sees Brigit choosing Jackos reliability and liking for the land (Echo 114) over Sonsons more belligerent nature, though Rachel suggests to her that she may care more for her older son. When Sonson plays his father in the Nine Night dramatization of Crews

15 encounter with Mr Charles, his assumption of the role is potentially very appropriate in that his own confrontational nature seems to render him well suited to re-enacting the murder. At this point, though, it becomes clear that Crews confrontation with Mr Charles is not the ultimate tearing-point of the play. In the restaging of the scene, Sonsons own response to violence is as much at issue as his fathers action, which it has seemed would provide the climax. Possessed by the spirit of his father, Sonson goes up the chain that has been suspended over the set throughout the play, as it were climbing back through slave history, and hovers above the stage in a limbo-like predicament. Along with the other players, Jacko watches him from the ground, with Brigit trying to convince him to desert his characteristic stance of non-involvement and intervene to bring his brother down. When Jacko eventually does so, he persuades Sonson/Crew that his talk of having murdered Mr Charles is stupidness (Echo 134) and that the blood on his shirt is that of a hog, whose killing has been referred to at several points in the earlier scenes. Sonson comes down and acts out a different version of Crews meeting with Mr Charles, in which he goes to the estate owner to beg a small help out (Echo 136). Given that Crew is dead and the Nine Night is being held to commemorate him, this version does not exactly supplant the earlier one, which of course has also been a product of Sonsons imagination. Nevertheless, within the context of the Nine Nights ritual re-enactment, it provides an alternative narrative, which is relevant as an expression of his own psychic conflict and his rapprochement with his brother. The Nine Night is the frame for virtually all the action and within this Sonson and Jacko have had major parts to play in the story of their dead father, while he has never been a character in his own right, only a vicarious presence, a part to be acted by others.21

16 So the dnouement of An Echo in the Bone moves beyond violence, without closing down the possibility that, given the historical legacy of slavery, this is one possible response. Appropriately, since she has been the initiator of the Nine Night, the last words are given to Rachel: No matter what is past, you cant stop the blood from drumming, and you cant stop the heart from hoping. We have to hold on to one another. That is all we can do. That is what leave behind, after all the rest. Play, Rattler. Play for what leave behind. Play for the rest of us. (Echo 136) And the play ends with the mute Rattlers drum beating louder and louder in celebration (Echo 136-7). So the conclusion reasserts the unquenchability of the communitys spirit and Rattlers drum. These are the echoes in the bone which ensure that the disenfranchized will survive. The play has given them total ownership of the theatrical space in which history has been repossessed and it has drawn on the continuities of shared Afro-Caribbean folk culture, which it renews and extends through its own theatrical performance and without recourse to European mediation.

NOTES N Derek Walcott, The Haitian Trilogy, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, 259. Drums and Colours was first performed in the Royal Botanical Gardens, Port of Spain as part of an arts festival held to mark the opening of the Federal West Indian Parliament in April 1958. 2 A co-production of the York theatre companies, York Theatre Royal and Riding Lights, first performed at York Theatre Royal in March 2007 to mark the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade and originally commissioned by the Church Mission Society, founded in the late eighteenth century by members of the abolitionist movement. 3 Best known as the composer of Hair, MacDermots previous collaborations with Walcott had included The Joker of Seville (1974), O Babylon! (1976), Marie Laveau (1979) and Steel (1991). The rewritten version of Walker, with his music, was premiered by the Boston Playwrights Theatre in 2001. 4 Not named in the play, the publication in question most obviously relates to the third edition of Walkers Appeal (first edn. 1829), which demanded the immediate emancipation of all slaves. 5 Derek Walcott, Walker and Ghost Dance, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, 27, 61, 97, 114. 6 Walker and Ghost Dance, 33. 7 Walker was found dead shortly after the publication of the third edition of his Appeal and is widely believed to have been poisoned, though the official record has tuberculosis as the cause of his death. 8 George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin, London: Michael Joseph, 1953, 56-7. 9 Soyinkas poem Abiku glosses its title with the words: Wanderer child. It is the same child who dies and returns again and again to plague the mother Yoruba belief, Idanre and Other Poems, New York: Hill and Wang, 1968, 28. 10 E.g. Albert Olu Ashaolu, Allegory in Ti-Jean and His Brothers, World Literature Written in English, 16, 1 (1977), 20211. 11 Cf. Rawle Gibbonss rather later Shepherd (1981). In Shepherd a group of Spiritual Baptists struggle over the life of an unborn child in the context of a mourning ritual which, as in An Echo in the Bone, provides a frame for the re-enactment of scenes from the past. See Judy S. J. Stone, Theatre: Studies in West Indian Literature, London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994, 151. 12 Originally published in 1793 as the History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, Edwardss work was later expanded into the History of the British Colonies in the West Indies, which went through several editions. Scotts citation comes in a scene set in 1792, An Echo in the Bone, in Plays for Today, ed. Errol Hill, Harlow, Kingston and Port of Spain: Longman Caribbean, 1985, 92. Subsequent references are to this edition. 13 Quoted in Stone, Theatre: Studies in West Indian Literature, 146. 14 Other plays that draw on the dramatic potential of the nine night include Edgar Whites The Nine Night (1983), in White, The Nine Night and Ritual by Water, London: Methuen, 1984; and Glenville Lovells When the Eagle Screams (1992). As indicated in Note 11, Rawle Gibbonss Shepherd also uses a mourning ritual for dramatic purposes. 15 Olive Senior, A-Z of Jamaican Heritage, Kingston: Heinemann and the Gleaner Co., 1987, 118. 16 See particularly Possession, Section IV of Brathwaites Islands, The Arrivants, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973, 230-57, Brathwaites note on the centrality of possession in Afro-Caribbean religious service, Islands, 271 and Brodbers use of the Jamaican magico-religious cult of myalism in Myal, London and Port of Spain: New Beacon, 1988. 17 Renu Juneja, Recalling the Dead in Dennis Scotts An Echo in the Bone, ARIEL, 23, 1 (1992), 98. 18 Caryl Phillips, The European Tribe, 1987; London: Picador, 1993, 45. 19 Juneja, Recalling the Dead, 98-9; italics in original. 20 The Muse of History, in Is Massa Day Dead?, ed. Orde Coombs, Garden City: NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1976, 2; repr. in Walcott, What the Twilight Says: Essays, London: Faber, 1998, 37. 21 In the first part of the play, the hard-drinking, womanizing peasant (Echo 74) Dreamboat is possessed by Crews spirit (Echo 80-82).