Cultural Critique 56Winter 2004Copyright 2004 Regents of the University of Minnesota

ARIELS ETHOSON THE MORAL ECONOMY OF CARIBBEAN EXPERIENCE

Holger Henke

Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever,by any religion, by any sect. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned,unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized;nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce peoplealong any particular path.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Few intellectuals and organic philosophers in the Caribbeanwill doubt that the region is in a severe moral and ethical crisis at thishistorical juncture. And yet, making this assertion presupposes theexistence of an indigenous moral and ethical matrix against whichsuch a judgment can be made. More often than not, however, pre-cisely this existence is concealed from the discourse about societyand moral development in the region. The following essay pursuesperhaps too ambitiouslya number of simultaneous objects. First, itintends to highlight some of the elements of what could perhaps becalled the Caribbean ethic/ethos. In this effort, the initial guidingquestions are: What are the elements that circumscribe Caribbeanthought? What are the motives for action? And what are the ethicsof the people inhabiting the Caribbean? Later, I will read this (recon-structed) ethos/ethic against Shakespeares play The Tempest, in par-ticular against the Wgures of Ariel and (to a lesser extent) Trinculo.Both texts, the Caribbean ethos and the Shakespearean Wgures,may (and I choose this word carefully, as I am setting out to exploresubtle connections and discontinuities) put each other into perspec-tive, withdraw each others legitimacy or basic assumptions, or rein-force common premises. Second, I will argue for a view of Ariel thatdiffers somewhat from the predominant interpretation by postcolonial

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writers. This view will direct the way in which the ShakespeareanWgures are deployed as a lens through which I choose to considerissues pertaining to the moral economy of the Caribbean. Third, theessay is an attempt to utilize differentsometimes deliberately dis-jointedregisters of writing with which to map the moral landscapeof Caribbean existence. Since Caribbean existence is circumscribedby a multiplicity of different discourses, themes, and cultural tradi-tionsrationalist-positivist, mythopoetic, Afrocentric, Marxist, andso on (see, e.g., Trouillot 2002)rather than to settle for any one ofthem, I consider it to be methodologically more appropriate to moveback and forth between the epistemological registers implied in thesediscourses.

The connection between ethos and ethics throughout this essay isnot arbitrary, but reXects the need to consider Caribbean people asmoral persons.1 This is to say that their actions and parameters ofthought should be regarded as a collective attempt of structuring andmaking sense of the world in a culturally speciWc way that facilitatesthe emergence of a certain measure of order and predictability.Unlike the moral agent of Kantian and utilitarian theories, the Carib-bean person should be regarded as a culturally embedded individualand not an abstract ghost acting in a cultural vacuum (Hinmann.d., 1). I intend to advance themes that, for a long time, have lin-gered in the discussions about Caribbean culture and identity butin the past have been centered on demonstrating the commonalitiesbetween African or Asian cultures and those of the Caribbean. WhileI Wrmly believe that these were utterly necessary in light of the re-quired reconstruction of self- and peoplehood and the budding pro-cesses of nation building, I am equally convinced that we havereached a point where it is appropriate to expand the parameters ofthese debates in order to arrive at a deWnition of the Caribbean per-sona sui generis, i.e., without constructing parallel universes. Thisattempt is neither denying the persistent validity of cultural heritagenor does it intend at the other extreme to promote a genetic argu-ment.2 However, it is my persuasion that the history, ontological con-ditions, epistemologies, and cosmologies of Caribbean peoples, intheir process of mutual attraction, rejection, and mixing, have createda unique intellectual space that has come to inform their habitualways of living and moral motivation.

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When I speak of philosophical thought, I would therefore liketo emphasize that I primarily refer to the everyday being of the Carib-bean subaltern, as opposed to the more educated and literal-scriptural discourses of outstanding Caribbean thinkers such as AimCsaire, Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James, and many others.3 As PagetHenry (2000, 2) pointed out recently, much of what can be regardedas philosophical statements in the Caribbean context are discursivepractices embedded in nonphilosophical discourses or texts. While,like all intellectual work, this is work in progress, I was especiallyencouraged by Henrys recent fascinating and important book Cal-ibans Reason and his and Wilson Harriss plea for a mythopoetic logicand the need for Caribbean writers to take greater account of thislogic, or as Henry calls them, gateways (2000, 106, 270). Although Ido not share with Harris the belief in the relative ontological irrele-vance of everyday life, I believe that the call for mythopoetic dis-courses is well placed when we consider the moral-ethical contoursof what I call Caribbean existence. My exploration of the everydaywells of Caribbean thought, therefore, stands somewhat in contrast toHenrys groundbreaking book, which focuses on the literary, hightradition of Caribbean thought. Thus, I do not regard everyday dis-courses merely as context, but rather as the most profound space ofenacting what it means to be a Caribbean person.

Although I do not consider myself a deconstructionist, I be-lieve that this method has its merits, considering that one importantfeature of Caribbean existence is the persistent presence of differ-ence and alterity, which give its discourse(s) an epistemologicalgravity that more often than not collapses them into each other (see,e.g., Bentez-Rojo 1996, 129; Henke 1997, 43). We will return to thisaspect later, but sufWce it to mention here that the intense competitionbetween different value systems in the region tends to simultane-ously validate and devalue all of them. The nature of Caribbeanphilosophical thought actually appears to demand that we approachit as a complex of ideas challenging us persistently to pursuetoborrow Gayatri Spivaks wordsa critique of what one cannotnot want (Landry and MacLean 1996, 28). I will attempt to integratethis approach into the very language of thought about the elementsof Caribbean moral existence, which may result in a play with wordsand, indeed, in seemingly irrational or poetic conclusions about its

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discursive space and limits. Using pun, innuendo, double-edgedirony, and so on, are autochthonous modes of Caribbean everydaydiscourse. By appropriating them as tools in the more highfalutinrationalist and positivistic lingua of academic discourse, we hope tocontribute to a validation of Caribbean thought that will demonstrateone possible way to more appropriately represent the people of theregion.4 In that, it entails an emancipation of those Caribbean intel-lectual traditions that have in the past often stood outside of the soci-etal discourse.5 It may then, indeed, become what Csaire in his 1944essay Poetry and Cognition called poetic knowledgethat is, knowl-edge in which man spatters the object with all of his mobilizedriches (quoted in Kelley 2000, 18).6

Thus, Ariel is Xying again. As a delimiting force acting in a denseweb of polycultural meanings and moral and intellectual codes, sheor he has proven to represent the elements of Xuidity and centrifu-gality in Caribbean existence. Ariel as a metatheoretical symbol for anongoing discourse about the nature of Caribbean existence shall inthe second half of this essay be the central Wgure through which I at-tempt to read some of the characterizations developed in the Wrst half.

THE CARIBBEAN AS AN ANTIESSENTIALIST SPACE

When conceptualizing and writing about the Caribbean, one has tobe acutely aware that the complex and violent history of the region,as well as the diverse peoples that have settled and labored in it,make it extremely difWcult to arrive at unanimous and universallyvalid conclusions and concepts about it. In this sense, the region isindeed a land in which the truth is wandering off the usual troddenpaths and, to use Krishnamurtis statement in the epigraph, limitless.However, not only the great diversity of cultures and their modes ofthinking and discourse contribute to this opaqueness, but also thefact that, in some of the original African, Indian, and Chinese culturesthemselves, binary oppositions and logocentric discourse, Westernnotions of progress, the juxtaposition of wo/man and nature, and theterminality of historyto mention only a few of the hegemonic modesof thought in the region during the past four or Wve centuriesdonot constitute the traditional epistemology.

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The nature of Caribbean thought is therefore profoundly anti-essentialist. This is to say that it tends to hold the view that natureand objects are not necessarily what they seem, that they do notreadily reveal their true nature (essence), or at least that they mayrepresent different essences at different times. It tends to Xatly re-ject monadic constructions that view reality as indivisible. Caribbeaneveryday discourse is engaged in an extensive use of multiple logics,code-switching, and artistic and satiric solution of possibly not re-soluble contradictions and paradoxes. To the extent that these shiftsand digressions are at the center of Caribbean existence, it is opposedto the notion of an essence itself. Let us consider, for example,Jamaican music icon Lee Scratch Perrys simultaneously idiosyn-cratic and clarifyingand, in my mind, quintessentially Caribbeanself-description:

Im an artist, a musician, a magician, a writer, a singer; Im everything.My name is Lee from the African jungle, originally from West Africa.Im a man from somewhere else, but my origin is from Africa, straightto Jamaica through reincarnation; reborn in Jamaica. . . . I have beenprogrammed; many people who born again must come back to learn alesson. . . . [H]ave you heard of ET? I am ET, savvy? Savvy? (quoted inKatz 2000, 1)

This cunning voice from a polyvalent, heteroclitic, hyperhybrid, Cha-gallian Caribbean cosmological and epistemological heterotopia7

gives a good impression of the rhizomaticas Glissant might putitdiscourse strategies in these parts.

Any conceptualization of Caribbean thought will consequentlyhave to take note of this antiessentialism and make it its fundamentalbasis. However, the use of terms and concepts of ethics, essentialismversus antiessentialism, and so on, may in itself very well already bea (Western) imposition on this space that inherently rejects bipolarmodes of thought, while enabling polyvalent patterns of thought andenacting multipolar patterns of action.8

Due to its history the region has a number of value systems oper-ating at various levels of societal discourse.9 Historically, and in manycases still today, the colonial values (i.e., the colonists aesthetics,their language, their beauty ideals, and so on) have constituted theprivileged discourse and deWned who is in and who is outside

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society. This situation has, for example, created a competing systemof social respectability clashing with a newer system of reputa-tion (Wilson 1973). Increasingly, the colonial and neocolonial dis-course has been pushed back, and a revalorization of primarilyAfrican values has come to deWne both social reputation and, to alesser extent, respectability. As Rohlehr has put it in another con-text, Caribbean self-perception hovers between the alternatives ofadamic renewal or return, and existentialist sense of void (1980, 14).Within this mix, we also Wnd social and philosophical traditions fromIndia and China.

BRIDGING THE CHASM: THE ROLE OF HUMORIN CARIBBEAN DISCOURSE

Whatever the particular mixture of these elements may be, it isapparent that the earlier described hybridity had one general conse-quence, which is common to most of Caribbean everyday life. I amreferring to the important function of humor (by innuendo) as amechanism to straddle competing value systems. Humor is to Carib-bean everyday discourse what music is for Caribbean entertain-ment.10 Ultimately, neither of the latter can do without the former.The humor that is typical for the Caribbean is, however, not simplyan empty and vain vessel of communication. Quite to the contrary,more often than not it embodies important lessons and truths. As asource of folk wisdom and tradition it does not establish a set ofprivileged and hegemonic moral rules, which may be enforced onany possible dissenters, but it strivesand usually succeedstodemonstrate its truth by enabling the listener or reader to tran-scend his or her own frame of reference and values. It does not estab-lish yet another center of discourse, but collapses the existing centers(Europe, Africa, India, and China) into each other in a way thatallows all to recognize their humanity andat the same timeto seethemselves from the outside. It makes the normal self strange toitself, or rather it reminds the Caribbean self of its multiple identitysources and thus fundamentally engenders discursive empathy. Inthe process of laughing, the listener engages in a sort of secular tran-scendental experience from which he or she emerges with a higher

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consciousness of him- or herself. It is the Caribbean subalterns wayto speak and to speak back to the colonialists (and all that followedthem). Humor is the Caribbeans unobtrusive strategy to establish asynthesis where only the opposition of thesis and antithesis seems tobe imaginable.11

Unlike for other humorous situations, humor in Caribbeaneveryday discourse is a constant possibility. In his theory of humorVeatch (1998) explained that for humor to function it requires threecomponents: (1) an element of normality (N), (2) the perception of asubjective moral violation in a situation (V), and (3) both V and Nneed to occur simultaneously. If V and N are understood as compet-ing value systems, then it becomes immediately understandable that,unlike in the theory, humor in the Caribbean is not deliberately con-structed. Caribbean everyday discourse does not require the situa-tional spark of a constructed moral violation of what is perceivedas normality in order to collapse or dissolve both elements in ahumorous way. By way of the constant presence, or at least potentialpresence, of clashing value systems, the transcendent moment offersitself to the witty comment at any given time. While the outsideobserver often attributes this lifestyle to the easygoing nature ofCaribbean people, for the Caribbean psyche the humorous transgres-sion means a devaluation of the moral absolutes contained in eachvalue system. In other words, what appears as carefree attitude inreality carries much more fundamental connotations with it. It is arelief from a persistently psychological tension that pervades manyCaribbean everyday situations and much of its discourse.

This situation has clear moral implications. Thus, as Veatch(1998) points out, most individuals have a subjective moral ordervested in N. To the extent that this moral order is challenged, ques-tioned, or humorously violated by V, Ns validity is slightly reducedor at least temporarily compromised. By invoking and humorouslystraddling this ambivalence, however, humor becomes a bridge overwhich the individual can traverse the chasm that opens between com-peting moral systems. Thus, while Fanon (1986, 183) speaks abouta manicheism delirium, and Csaire laments about societies inwhom fear has been cunningly instilled, who have been taught tohave an inferiority complex, to tremble, kneel, despair, and behavelike Xunkeys (2000, 43), we often see the Antillean laughingly shrug

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off the depth of the ontological abyssthe Valley of Non-beingsheor he is standing on top of, while wondering which side to turn to,and whether to turn at all.

Now, this role of humor is particularly pervasive in those Carib-bean countries that have strong competing value systems (e.g., inJamaica, Trinidad, or Guyana), while in more homogeneous Carib-bean societies the prevailing traditional African concepts (e.g., inHaiti) and creolizations thereof tend to reduce the moral tensions thatexist between such concepts by virtue of their ability to be sources oforder and communal peace. These concepts are both of and for thecommunity, which clearly points to their African origins (see Mbiti1999, 200). Cultural production (including everyday discourse) inthese societies often tends to de-emphasize the humorous elementobserved in the more diverse Caribbean societies, and focuses moreon spiritual, religious, and quasi-religious cultural grammar andiconography.

One Weld in which the insurgent and transcendental power ofhumor in the Caribbean has been mastered is the art of the kaiso.Among many appropriate lyrics, we may take a closer look at theTrinidadian calypsonian Mighty Sparrows song Obeah Wedding,which humorously contrasts two fundamentally different approachesat securing love.12 While the person, a woman named Melda, is tryingto attain Sparrows love through the use of an Obeah spell (by virtueof Obeahs Akan and Igbo roots, representing the African valuesystem), Sparrow points out to her that she does not fulWll more con-ventional criteria (presumably representing the European value sys-tem, as well as more universal preconditions to physical attraction).In the song Sparrow objects to her use of incense, garlic, and lard tobewitch him, and to her lack of personal hygiene. His advice to heris that if she will brush her teeth better and bathe herself regularlywith soap, she will likely Wnd a hubby without having to resort tolove spells and incense-burning rituals.

Interestingly, while Sparrow appears prima facie to reject theAfrican approach (i.e., the Obeah witchcraft), he does not carrythis criticism all the way through the song. Thus, his suggestions fora more successful approach might lead a cunumunu to becomeMeldas lover.13 The possible West African root of the term is clearly

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an expression pointing to the creole nature of the society where theobeah wedding is supposed to occur. By retaining this sympathy forAfricanness, the European value system is denied absolute hegemony.Ultimately, the informed listener is laughing about the way the simul-taneous presence and absence of both value systems converges in thisparticular courtship situation. Both end up putting each other in per-spective and coexist rather than compete with each other. Humortranscends the moral divisions of everyday discourse.

Ambivalences in Caribbean discourse are embedded in languageitself, a language that in many instances has been pieced together onthe basis of some European language, but which carries signiWcantremnants of African, Indian, and other languages. The most preva-lent forms of humor in Caribbean discourse therefore are pun andinnuendo, which are both based on linguistic ambiguity. Here humoris both embodied in and serves as the instrument for the transcen-dence of ambiguity and multiple codings.

TIME, COMMUNITY, COUNTERTIME

A deep understanding of Caribbean existence cannot escape the factthat time is conceived differently in the region than in the industrial-ized West. The well-known soon come and any time is Trinidadtime have actually become distinct selling features for travel agen-cies offering Caribbean vacations to bag-eyed Americans, Britons, orGermans. As will be demonstrated later (soon come), this seem-ingly trivial observation also has moral implications. Again, it isimportant to emphasize that there are various concepts of time com-peting with each other, and the various ways in which time is con-ceived or produced depend on the particular social and economiccircumstances of an individual or a community. Thus, the perceptionof time stands in an intimate relation to the particular mode of pro-duction it is engaged in.

However, before we go into this aspect, the role of origin(s) has tobe brought into the picture. Cosmologies and epistemologies pro-foundly different from the European concepts were invisible travel-ers of the Middle Passage. A linear concept of time such as in Western

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thought, with an indeWnite past, present, and inWnite future is dif-ferently constructed in traditional African society. The traditionalAfrican concept of time is mainly event-driven, concrete, andun-like modern European conceptsnot measured in abstract intervals:

Time has to be experienced to make sense or to become real. A personexperiences time partly in his own individual life, and partly throughsociety which goes back many generations before his own birth. Sincewhat is the future has not been experienced, it does not make sense; itcannot, therefore, constitute part of time, and people do not know howto think about itunless, of course, it is something which falls withinthe rhythm of natural phenomena. (Mbiti 1999, 17)14

Without question, this concept of time is inextricably bound with acosmology and religion that values community and, thus, moralityas a social and public affair. Different concepts of time have clashedin the region. As Birth (1999) has explained in great detail, the previ-ously described prevalent African conception of time was forciblyreplaced by European clock time. The latter stood for the temporalrigidities and, by implication, the racist hierarchies and ethnocentricvalue systems introduced and perpetuated by the colonial plantationsystem. But clock time also stood for a moral order that put a pre-mium on the individual rather than on the community as a whole.In fact, it actually stood for the imposition of temporal ownershipof a largely atomized expatriate group over other peoples labor,indeed, their bodies and therefore their existence. Of course, with thepersistence of capitalist working arrangements in largely urban envi-ronments, technological time continues to be the deWning conceptfor the scheduling of many, if not most, signiWcant daily activitiesthroughout the Caribbean.

In contrast, as Glissant (1989, 93) points out, the Caribbean per-son intuitively and deWantly rejects any set notion of time, particu-larly clock time. The ideal becomes a non-deWned understandingof time, a concept of time that does not measure in Wxed divisions,but rather according to what in a given context appears to be the nat-ural dynamic or sequence of events. This natural, more Xuid under-standing of time is, for example, embodied in Trinidadian liming.Liming, a contradiction to clock time, is by deWnition a social affair.An individual alone cannot lime (Eriksen 1990). It requires a group of

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like-minded companionsfamily, perhaps, or friendswho hangout together and follow the Xow of the groups collective will andmood(s) in their activities. Clock time is the last thing on their minds.Thus, while liming actively opposes exogenous ways of rigidly orga-nizing labor and/or leisure, it posits an ethic of community againstthe ascetic rationalism inherent in capitalism and Protestantism.15

In liming the primacy of community, understood as a natural andlargely voluntary system of rules, is resurrected or asserted throughthe impositionor rather lackof (a sequence of) group action(s).16

It is rather a democratic enterprise than a hierarchically structuredprocess. Without doubt, liming as an activity ought to be consideredas a Caribbean form of resistance to an ethic for which wasting timeis the Wrst and in principle most serious of all sins:

Loss of time because of conviviality, luxury, even because of more thanthe necessary and healthy amount of sleep6 to 8 hours at mostismorally absolutely detestable. (Weber 1973, 159; my translation)

It is important to note that while both ethics are essential concepts,the Caribbean ethos is really the movement, the constant negotiationbetween the poles deWning the two extremes. Thus, as Birth (1999,13442) points out correctly, glosses such as jus now, soon come,or any time is Trinidad time are widely used placeholders thatsimultaneously demarcate the conXict of two or more different ethics(here, temporal concepts) and help to defuse or negotiate this con-Xict. While they never really resolve the fundamental existing antag-onism, they serve as markers that establish a common ground thatmost parties to the conXict intuitively recognize as an inalienablepart of their (national) identity. Thus, these markers implicitly say,This is who we are as Trinidadians, Jamaicans, Caribbeans. TheytheconXict and the glossesare what make us us. Thus, the Carib-beans unique moral condition oscillates between essentialist posi-tions. In other words, the Caribbean persona tends to reject either/ordichotomies and prefers to embrace explicitly contextualized andsynergetic concepts of moral valorization as part of its identity. Thisimpulse is strongest among the ethnic majority in the region, the peo-ple of African origin, and it stands in constant contrast to the ofWcialEurocentric (political) system.

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It should be obvious that in the earlier sketched Protestant-capitalist (work) ethic, individualism is the basic organizing principle.The corollary of de-emphasizing community can be found in theWestern tendency to moral abstraction, such as described, for exam-ple, in Kants hypothetical imperative. Without doubt, as form(ality)this ethos is also inscribed in the symbolic landscape (and the mind-scape) inhabited by Caribbean people (cf. Abrahams 1983, 140). Onemight even go so far as to suggest that liming is a distant echo of aris-tocratic European concepts of leisurely individualism. However, inAfro-Caribbean tradition there is a greater emphasis on limiting indi-vidualism by the demands of the community (see, e.g., Gbadegesin1998, 293). These traditions have survived in the Caribbean. Thus,as Mintz and Trouillot point out, in Haitian vodou the differencebetween good and evil is realized in practice rather than throughsome essential manicheism as in Christianity (1998, 131). While theimposed moral value system puts a premium on individualism andegocentrism, the morality of Caribbean society is characterized by afundamental anthropocentrism.17 In this tradition, a person who sim-ply watches while children Wght or when conXict occurs betweenadults is not a good person.18

The communal aspect of (several) Caribbean societies is, however,not simply an African tradition, but also has deep roots in Hindu phi-losophy and religion.19 Although there is a strong emphasis on com-munity in this tradition, it is important to keep in mind that whilemoral concepts such as justice are certainly a part of it, they are some-what broken through the social divisions implemented through thecaste system. Although the caste system and its pertinent notions ofpurity and pollution clearly stand in contrast to the theory of univer-sal justice in European thought, they also show parallels to its class-based praxis.20 There can be no doubt that the rigidity of the castesystem has become seriously undermined in the creolized/creolizingsocieties of the Caribbean, but given the original epistemology andcosmology of African and Hindu philosophy, it has to be noted thatboth Africans and East Indians approached the dominant (i.e., Euro-pean) power structures from a different epistemological basis. Thus,while African moral concepts were diametrically opposed to Euro-pean classist (and, of course, racist) rule and its adjacent notion of

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individualism, East Indian ethicswhile equally opposed to the abusesand indignities of their indentureshipwere at some level able toaccommodate the rigidities and rituals of a hierarchical social order.

In much of Caribbean and Latin American writing, the conXictbetween European and creolized Afro-Asian moralities has been sym-bolically expressed by the Wgures of Prospero and Caliban in Shake-speares play The Tempest and an entire body of both academic andcreative literature based on or inspired by it. I would like to cast myfollowing interpretation of the Caribbean moral landscape in thistradition. However, it is my intention to rehabilitate the Wgure ofAriel, who can be seen to negotiate between the usually more promi-nently considered Caliban and Prospero.

ARIELS RETURN

Hegemonic discourse cannot simply conWne itself to establishing ataxonomy of civilization, i.e., deWning the agents of civilization andthe subjects of subjugation. The social dynamics of oppressive ruledemand a more continuous production of stereotypical civilityand barbarism (Brown 1985, 58). Throughout the Caribbean, intel-lectual discourse has in the last forty or so years used the Prospero-Caliban antagonism as a metaphor to describe and analyze the colo-nial and postcolonial relations between the discursive center and itsperiphery.21 However, there is also a case to be made for Ariel, theelusive, ghostlike, creative, spirit-force, whoalbeit being his mas-ters instrumentnevertheless moves the unfolding plot of power,subordination, and revelation by the way of his otherworldly andintangible, invisible hand. As I will argue, Ariel appears to personifythe force of ideas that only slowly and incrementally move the courseof history, but, once recognized for what they are, become a resourcethat cannot be resisted even by armies.

We recall that Shakespeares Ariel had left the stage to liveunder the blossom that hangs on the bough (5.1.94). But let us sup-pose for a second that he has forgotten something and returns afterall others have left the stage; time may have passed, but as always, anaudience is there:

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ARIEL enters stage from the left, still. Looking around in wonderment, he doesntseem to Wnd himself where he wanted to be. He leaves the stage to mingle withthe audience. Bob Marleys Rastaman Chant is playing from imaginativeloudspeakers between the readers ears. While walking offstage, Ariel clears histhroat, then begins to speak: Anyone here named Pablo? Pablo Picasso? (Noreply from the audience.) Nobody? (Thinking) Well, anybody here who canexplain the origin of Cubism? (Pauses) Oh, perhaps it is too early to ask.Youre just enjoying 1611, 1838, 1933, 1989, or thereabout! (Loud, impa-tient) Well, what are you staring at me for, then? Go home, people, theshow is over. Go back to Auschwitz, Bhopal, Chernobyl, Seveso, Soweto,Gulag, Nagasaki, wherever you come from. (He disappears to the right,now humming Marleys Redemption Song.)

Is it possible that Ariel, or even Caliban of Shakespeares The Tempest,could have addressed the audience and in such an irreverent way?Hardly. And yet, it is certainly imaginable that a new monologuecould be written in a similar way. But new questions need to beasked: Who is the audience addressed in this manner? Why is Arielleaving them? What is the nature of the show that was being playedbefore this imaginary monologue? Such questions point to the factthat parameters in the dialogue between hegemon and subalternhave shifted and are subject to continuous paradigmatic shifts orinSylvia Wynters terminologyepistemic change. Thus, as for exam-ple Stuart Hall has pointed out in his essay New Ethnicities, therecan be no simple return or recovery of the ancestral past which isnot re-experienced through the categories of the present (2001, 448).Or, as Scott argues more abstractly, Ariels new monologue could beunderstood as an invitation to take up the more difWcult task ofthinking fundamentally against the normalization of the epistemo-logical and institutional forms of our political modernity (1999, 20).

Few Caribbean writers have bothered much with Ariel. One ofthem, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, the cornucopian wordsmith fromBarbados, has attempted to bring the ghost into the picture. In hisarticle Caliban, Ariel, and Unprospero in the ConXict of Creoliza-tion: A Study of the Slave Revolt in Jamaica in 183132, Brathwaiteinterprets the creolization process by utilizing Shakespeares protag-onists as archetypical actors in the colonial drama. Although he isaware of it, it would appear that his Ariel does not unfold the fullambivalence Shakespeare had applied to his persona. In Brathwaites

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interpretation, Ariel, usually an educated slave or freedman opento white creolization and technology (1977, 48), mainly acts as ago-between, an intermediary, a Hermes, delivering signals and ordersfrom the colonial Fhrerbunker to the front lines of colonial sugarplantations in the Caribbean.22

In contrast to Brathwaite, I suggest that Ariel cannot be appliedas an archetype that denotes a particular personality on the colonialstage. Rather, Ariel has to be read for what he really is, an etherealforce permeating the sky just around the heads of the colonial in-truder but operating well below the radar of his/her sight/con-sciousness. I argue that Ariel is more appropriately understood asa metaphor for a set of practices in Caribbean everyday life. Whois Shakespeares Ariel really? Isnt she or he a creature that haspromised temporary service, but really only exists for the single-minded pursuit of his ultimate day of freedom?23 Is there more toil?Since thou dost give me pains, / Let me remember thee what thouhast promisd, / Which is not yet performd me (1.2.24244). Thereis nothing ambiguous about this demand. But Ariel knows realpoli-tik. Prospero is in possession of superior magic: If thou murmurst,I will rend an oak, / And peg thee in his knotty entrails, till / Thouhast howld away twelve winters (1.2.29496). The result follows aclear cost-beneWt analysis:

ariel: Pardon, master:I will be correspondent to command,And do my spiriting gently.prospero: Do so; and after two daysI will discharge thee.ariel: Thats my noble master!What shall I do? say what; what shall I do? (1.2.297300)

Ariel may be an ethereal force, but he is no dreamer. He is well awareof his limits. He temporarily allies himself with his antithesis in pur-suit of the promise and ultimate goal. Indeed, where Caliban is de-ploring his fate, Ariel is taking action.

Rather than Brathwaites Ariel, the Ariel envisioned in this essaycomes closer to Rods emphatic description written in 1900:

He is generous enthusiasm, elevated and unselWsh motivation in allactions, spirituality in culture, vivacity and grace in intelligence. Ariel is

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the ideal toward which human selection ascends, the force that wieldslifes eternal chisel, effacing from aspiring mankind the clinging ves-tiges of Caliban, the plays symbol of brutal sensuality. (1988, 31)

Thus, Rods Ariel is more an invisible hand or an (elusive?) goal tobe aspired to. While we acknowledge the positive spin given to Arielin Rods essay, we also need to be mindful of the limits that theauthor imposed on this Wgure, which have been criticized by otherssuch as Carlos Fuentes (in the foreword to the 1988 edition) andRoberto Fernndez Retamar (1988). His endorsement of Europeanin particular Frenchculture and complete neglect of Americanindigenous cultural contributions have to be noted as unfortunateshortcomings, even if weas Fuentes doesattempt to understandit in the context of the essays historical origins.

Similarly (and perhaps yet closer to the central argument pur-sued here), as J. Michael Dash points out, a more positive readingof Shakespeares Ariel has also been suggested by Csaire. In thevoice of [Csaires] Ariel, the language of the land Wnds expression(1986, 57). In Dashs view, Csaires Ariel is directed toward the tran-scendence of the revolt against Prospero:

His discourse is rooted in the belief that the imagination at its mostintensive strives beyond moral, political, and sexual divisions for anandrogynous wholeness. (56)

In Csaire/Dashs interpretation, Ariel becomes a voice of (nonteleo-logical) nature, of the landscape itself, which thus seems to becomean additional protagonist of the discourse. Ariel, then, is the voice ofa proto-ecological discourse.24 Yet, by virtue of his quasi-supernatu-ralistic appearance, Ariel seems to point to a higher order. The notionof ethereal force implies certain powerspowers that cannot be seen,operating subtly yet with determination, transmitting waves throughthe air that may on different occasions either gently direct or an-nounce dread with a thunderous voice. Ariel, imprisoned by Sycoraxinto a cloven pine; within which rift, / Imprisond thou didst pain-fully remain, without doubt is a master of music in Shakespearesplay (1.2.27779). Does it take too much imagination to see him akinto a skin stretched over a drum? Isnt his ghostly song really the trans-posed voice of Africa, the voice of the African-Caribbean? Isnt there

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dreadful riddim in his song?: Full fadom Wve thy father lies; / Of hisbones are coral made; / Those are pearls that were his eyes (1.2.399400). There is even clearer evidence that Ariel has Maroon character:

. . . Then I beat my tabor;At which, like unbackd colts, they prickd their ears,Advancd their eyelids, lifted up their noses,As they smelt music: so I charmd their ears,That, calf-like, they my lowing followd . . . (4.1.17579)

If Ariel is not dubbing to a dub plate, his pied piper stage presencestill conjures up the cosmology of African peoples. He is clearly not ofthe same Xesh and blood as Prospero, Caliban, or Trinculo. Togetherwith Prospero he both invokes and revokes a different time experi-ence: My charms Ill break, their senses Ill restore, / And they shallbe themselves (5.1.3132; see also 3.3). As indicated above, Arielsghostly appearance also carries a morality of its own:

You are three men of sin, whom Destiny,. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Hath causd to belch up you; and on this island,Where man doth not inhabit,you mongst menBeing most unWt to live. I have made you mad. (3.3.5358)

This morality is not only contained in Shakespeares writing, but alsoinnate in the invocation of African cosmology as it appears throughthe Ariel Wgure. Without doubt in the African cosmology and theolo-gies, spirits and spiritual forces are in close contact with humans.They occupy a somewhat intermediary position between the realm ofhuman existence and the Supreme Being. There is communication,indeed interaction, and the well-being of humans depends on theirability to please spiritual forces. As one prominent African theologianand philosopher has put it:

Spirits as a group have more power than men, just as in a physical sensethe lions do. Yet, in some ways men are better off, and the right humanspecialists can manipulate or control the spirits as they wish. Men para-doxically may fear, or dread, the spirits and yet they can drive the samespirits away or use them to human advantage. (Mbiti 1999, 78)

This relationship not only seems to describe the Ariel-Prospero

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relationship, but also connotes a moral dimension that is signiWcantlydifferent from the Christian tradition where no intermediary forcesallow the active manipulation of social relationships or commu-nal well-being. Where Europeans encountered Ariels African spiritworld in the West Indies it may, indeed, have made them mad.

READING ARIEL BACKWARD

So far I have utilized the Shakespearean play in a rather conventionalway, i.e., to help interpret and reinterpret the Prospero-Arieldynamic, the colonial encounter, and power relationships betweenEurope, Africa, and the Caribbean. But more is possibleandrequiredin order for us to make the fullest use of the Bardsambiguous dialogues (see also Forbes 2001, 56). I shall therefore turnaround the mirror to see who indeed is the most beautiful around. Itis Ariels time to laugh and lead the conversation.

ariel: Now, youre still here, bewitcher? Hasd somehow missed thylast boat home? Backra no longer, much smaller thy frame lookd now.The golden chain around your paunch is gone, cant stop my time nomore. How doest thou feel this day without thy horsemen, bible, can-non, bare now and face to face with me alone?prospero: Oh Ariel, my good spirit. Thy tone speakd of mistrust, dis-content even. Thou didst not doubt my commitment ever, to you, thefair isle we chose to share. Say I am right! Few moments in time I in-tended just to borrow, to help you, even now, brighten your days, ours.ariel: Hush up now, where is your style, the good taste you once pre-tended? Like sugar it appears to have dissolved to nothing, sweet van-ity, foaming on your somersaulting lips. (Frowns) Quite unappetizing!Speaking of jumps and rolls; did mine eyes not glimpse last night one ofyour European companions, jumping on his toes tips, quite obviouslycontrary to the drum n basss riddim? Quite a sight, I confessto you. And thou shouldst tell the fool that, for the most part, he andhis party have not gotten in their veins what some would call a poly-rhythm. Not born to be a prodigy to music, the sweetest of all arts;remember, the waves of air are my domain. Quite obviously, my clumsyone, no Sly Dunbar, Max Roach, or Elvin Jones yet from your seedsprang forth.

Thus, or similar, the Bard might have felt compelled to write, had hebeen born in the West Indiesand black.

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But perhaps no one has expressed the need to write back and thedetermination to reclaim the moral authority over the destiny of theCaribbean and its peoples more eloquently and forcefully than Mon-sieur Csaire himself:

Therefore, comrade, you will hold as enemiesloftily, lucidly, consis-tentlynot only sadistic governors and greedy bankers, not only pre-fects who torture and colonists who Xog, not only corrupt, check-lickingpoliticians and subservient judges, but likewise and for the same rea-son, venomous journalists, goitrous academics, wreathed in dollars andstupidity, ethnographers who go in for metaphysics, presumptuous Bel-gian theologians, chattering intellectuals born stinking out of the thighof Nietzsche, the paternalists, the embracers, the corrupters, the back-slappers, the lovers of exoticism, the dividers, the agrarian sociologists,the hoodwinkers, the hoaxers, the hot-air artists, the humbugs, and ingeneral, all those who, performing their functions in the sordid divisionof labor for the defense of Western bourgeois society, try in diverse waysand by infamous diversions to split up the forces of Progresseven if itmeans denying the very possibility of Progressall of them tools ofcapitalism, all of them, open or secretly, supporters of plundering colo-nialism, all of them responsible, all hateful, all slave-traders, all hence-forth answerable for the violence of revolutionary action. (2000, 5455)

As Lewis Gordon has pointed out, thinking through the periphery,the underside, the subaltern could as well be characterized as Cal-iban studies, if we will, where the focus is study through which Pros-peros language can be decentered (2000, 3). And yet, writing backto Shakespeare, or reading Ariel backward, remains in some ways toomuch within the given conWnes of European discourse. The rhetoricaltropes and Wgures basically remain the same, if mirrored in a some-what renegade style.25 Ariel remains mired in an Enlightenmentargument, which prima facie would appear to Wt him well. However,his adeptness to a polyrhythmic ontology is merely a gesture since itstays tied to the logic and narrative Xow of the colonizer. Althoughthis allows for considerable leverage, it also tries to Wght the battle ona turf that has already been occupied, deWned, and therefore tainted.Enlightenment morality was class- and race-based, i.e., dependent onthe existence/creation of an Other, and hence is unWt for applicationto Caribbean contexts or for the purpose of comprehensive liberation.However, let us not part with Ariel yet, foras Henry has argued

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incisivelyour engagement with the poeticist tradition in Caribbeanthought is a necessary corrective to the predominance of the histori-cist school within it (2000, 25760). Ariel now has to remove him-self out of the bipolarity that has emerged, stand aside, and read thevoices of both protagonists from the side, that is, by applying a dif-ferent angle. It is time to shatter, not just turn, the mirror.

READING ARIEL SIDEWAYS

If we can read Shakespeare backward, there must also be a way toread the text of The Tempest or some of the characters sideways. Butwhat can that possibly mean, and how can we read sideways? Obvi-ously, reading backward implied a certain critique of the originaltext. However, by doing so, the backward-read text runs the risk ofbecoming a new orthodoxy. Reading sideways then must presum-ably provide us with an interpretation that does not easily run therisk of transforming itself into such a Wxed positionality or hege-monic interpretation. In fact, it has itself to exhibit transforming prop-erties, i.e., it has to be open to interpretation while shedding light onthe existing text and countertext. Thus, it has to be a sort of guidinglight without actually being a beacon.

In attempting to outline the contours of such a discourse, I hopethat my application of Shakespearean characters against themselves,as well as against the ambiguous moral economy of Caribbean exis-tence, may be a very modest attempt to contribute to Scotts muchlarger project of refusing history its subjectivity, its constancy, itseternity; to think it otherwise than as the pasts hold over the present,to interrupt its seemingly irrepressible succession, causality, its sov-ereign claim to determinacy (1999, 105). For our effort of mappingthe moral economy of Caribbean existence, this refusal would thentranslate into a text that equally questions hegemonic and counter-hegemonic value-system discourses in the region. It would haveto achieve this by steering clear of both universalism and cultural rel-ativism. The question is: Can it be done and has it been done inthe region?

The second part of this question is easy to answer. There can beno doubt that many aspects of the ongoing creolization experience(s)

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in the region show how the peoples of this region have both used andrefused elements of both their autochthonous value coordinatesand those imposed by the colonial project. If, as I believe it has, theimposed colonial moral economyperpetuated in numerous differ-ing ways in the postcolonial Caribbeanwas a conscious attemptto confuse and corrupt the moral stage on which the colonial andpostcolonial dramas were acted out, a reconWgured moral economycannot be gained by choosing between African, Anglo-European,andto a lesser extentIndo-Asian values. Instead, the way forwardappears to be in attempts to normalize a deeply creolized economyof emotions and values.26

In many instances the popular imagination in the region hasmoved in this direction, especially in the realms of magico-religiouspractices, for example, in Haitian vodou. Beauvoir-Dominique (1998),among others, describes the early rise of Freemason societies and thecontinuing widespread use of wizard spell books (grimoires) in Haiti.These underground realms of being, as she calls it, are to my mindthe most obvious attempts to create order, a new order, out ofreconWgured elements inherited from ancestral and acquired occultspaces of we (see also Hurbon 1995, 14649):

Imagine fumes of sulfur, lashing of whips, echoing forth to present-dayPetwo ritual. Following centuries of bricolage, the Creoles needed direc-tion and synthesis: a shredding down to impose order through hierar-chy and command. Radically new ritual arrangement guided themthroughout their war, under the obedience of Petwo (sou lobedyansPetwo). (Beauvoir-Dominique 1998, 162)

And yes, there are deWnite attempts to unlearn the bi- and tripolari-ties imposed on the people of the region. Some of these attemptsgo beyond the simple use of language, text, and spoken word, andmake their statements in the realm of music and the creative arts(see also Forbes 2001, 66). Othersimportant for a social scienceanalysisstay dedicated to the use of words and language, but at thesame time attempt to transcend the inherited materials and re-createan original language and discourse about Caribbean ethics/ethos.

Foremost, in my mind, is the poetic work of Brathwaite who hasdeveloped, as Bobb puts it, a style and form that transform the mar-ginality of the past into a centralizing force (1998, 46). The key word

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here is transform. Brathwaites writing style, indeed, has surpassedmany conventions, and with the materials offered by history and con-temporary affairs, his entire oeuvre is a re-creation of an authenticCaribbean voice, a re-indigenization and reoccupation of the moraland ethical space held by Caribbean indigenous and African peo-ples before the arrival of the colonialists. Thus, when he describesthe view from the location where he lived in Jamaica, overlookingKingston:

Kingston Harbour the sea fr-om Old Harbour, SpanishTown, Caymanas, right round to Bull Bay, Pharoah Sanders sun-ship and valley-mist, the huge huge a-ll day sky and the distan(t) sea-sky where Cuba an(d) Hispaniola would be,

except that we are lookinsouth tho feelin north (Brathwaite 1999, 124)

he does not simply depict a geographic, but attempts to characterizealso the torn and fragmented historicity of the intellectual spaceinhabited by modern Caribbean woman/man.

In fact, however, the authentic, organic voice of the Caribbean isevident in many different locations and efforts of artistic (re)creation.Can this be done on a larger, and more sustained scale, one thateven infects the (academic) discourse about Caribbean existence? Theanswer to this question will dependamong other thingson thehistorical process and distribution of class power. The uneasy coexis-tence of different registers of existence in the region allows us, how-ever, to take the Shakespearean markers and emblems and reorderthem for the exploration of a mindscape that has dramatically alteredfrom the time when he fantasized about the New World. The rawmaterial is there. The seeds of a fundamental discursive displacementin the Caribbean exist at the margins of (ofWcial) society and willalways represent a potential option indicating that the ofWcial moraleconomy in the region could and ought to be stacked in ways that

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decenter legitimacy claims of universal, homogenous, privileged,monadic, and positivist markers and signiWers. The result, however,will not be another Wxed point, a deWnite and deWning narrative, but,as Bentez-Rojo reminds us aptly, the goal . . . lies always at anunreachable point, at the edge of the inWnite, there, in a space thatshifts continually from the possible to the impossible (1996, 182):

ariel: So, could it be done?prospero: Why you always asking me? Havent I given all the wronganswers yet? Go Wnd your own. Leave me out of this.ariel: Well, I take your word. This is the last you see of me.prospero, now seemingly wrapped in deep thought: Yeah, yeah. Thats Wne.I dont have all your answers, why are you even asking me? (Sucking histeeth; then, as if suddenly reminding himself of something) I do share your . . .(Pauses) No, lets not start again.trinculo: Are you ready to leave already? You cant quit now. (Both juststare at him.) I mean, its just not the time yet.ariel: Why dat? Is yo mumma tell yuh? Or de nex one. What im nameagain? Aloysius Gossamer Longshoreman . . . somting somting . . .?trinculo: Just wait. Its not the right time yet.prospero: Im not going anywhere anyhow. Im down with you.trinculo: Well, as I say, this is not the right time yet. This is the agewhere you go dot-com. But, you dont want to go down there, do you?ariel: Why not, ah feel ready long time, man.trinculo: Yeah, yeah, you feel ready long time and that old fart next toyou doesnt even remember what time is. So, what are you telling meabout long time? Time longer than rope. I say you have to wait. Youwait, itll be here soon enough.prospero, protests: Hey, hey, hey; I remember why were here. I broughtyou here after all. (Falling back into thoughtfulness/forgetfulness) But wait,isnt it all over now? What are we waiting for?trinculo, with attitude: You didnt hear what I said, old man. I say youhave to stick around. You have to wait for 2Dog. Hell question youranswers, your doubts, and your questions.ariel, imitating a British accent: Well, then, why dont we all enjoy a cupof tea in the meantime? I have here the Wnest of the Wnest. A ratherexquisite mixture imported from Ceylonpardon me, Sri Lanka.

If waiting for 2Dog, hybridity, ambivalence, code-switching, irony,and moral dualities are a hallmark of Caribbean moral existence, thesocioeconomic everyday realities on the ground also force them-selves back into the foreground to prevent a pure poetics of Caribbean

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existence. This shift in perspective seems to be implied, for example,in George Lammings work, particularly when he raises the issue ofa sovereignty beyond the narrowly conceived political sovereigntyof new Caribbean nations and invokes a notion of sovereignty con-ceived as the capacity you have for choosing and making and remak-ing that self which you discover is you, is distinctly you (2002, 147).Due to the immense technological capabilities of our times andbecause of the movement nature of Caribbean existence, our mytho-poetic perspective of the Caribbean moral economy can and indeedhas to turn back to a more positivist evaluation. Thus, using Lam-mings shift as a starting point, the question may be posed where theCaribbean stands in regard to the current transformation of thehumanist ethos.

Although ethic and moral philosophy have for some time laggedbehind the new developments in technology, we are currently ina transition that at its end maywhether we like it or notevenmake the old humanistic moral economy obsolete.27 Since the dawnof human consciousness and certainly since the European Enlighten-ment, individuals could at best hope to be a sub-ject (i.e., attainmentof independence under a preexisting and encompassing conceptualframe, such as God, human rights, and so on). Due to advances withthe Human Genome Project, advances in cloning, and stem cell tech-nology, new horizons are looming under which humanity has thepossibility to move from being a subject to becoming a project.

As far as I can see, the debate about ethical and moral ques-tions emerging from these possibilities has been considerably morenuanced, philosophically rigorous, and intense in Europe than in themore pragmatic U.S. public.28 In the Caribbean, however, I do notyet see the emerging contours of the Caribbean perspective on theseissues. In the past we have witnessed concern about young blackgirls in the region using skin bleaching substances, but what if U.S.companies were to offer genetic manipulation that would promiseto achieve Michael Jacksonlike or Jennifer Lopeztype featureswithout the use of a scalpel? What would be the social implicationsfor the region if there were doctors offering phenotypically black par-ents an affordable option to have their child become a browningXowing hair, straight elongated nose, thin lips, and all?

Perhaps regional intellectuals and decision makers implicitly

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believe that these issues can be avoided, since they may be able tocode-switch through the new options that are evolving. And perhapsthat might even work. But, as mentioned before, something else isalso eroding; the (imperfect) fundamentals of humanism such ashuman dignity, inviolability of life, the integrity of the person, and soon are quite possibly Wghting a lost battle against the overwhelmingtyranny of the possible implicit in these new life-changing tech-nologies. Like it or not, these humanist fundamentals have affectedthe Caribbeana creation of European, African, and Asian culturesto a great extent. If we are indeed on the verge of becoming ourown project, how will the Caribbean elect to shape itself and itsfuture? How will its moral economy evolve if humanisms lure isfading? If hitherto the Caribbean was a hybrid of Europe and Africa(and, to a lesser extent, parts of Asia and the Near East), what willbe the long-term effects of the possible disappearance of the argu-ably most substantial inXuence, the European humanistic system? Inwhose image will the Caribbean create itself following these epochalchanges? Will we witness a showdown betweento analogize withAristotles classiWcation of knowledgean Afro-/Indo-centric mythicpoiesis (as the basis of a new thrust of Caribbean nationalisms) anda U.S.-inspired quick-buck praxis (i.e., globalization), while the Euro-humanistic rationalist theoria falls by the wayside? Ariel will have tobe on the move again and can no longer afford the same degree ofphilosophical liming as in the past.29

Notes

For their numerous comments that helped me to disentangle some of my ideas,I am grateful to John Bewaji, J. A. George Irish, Karl-Heinz Magister, TrevorPurcell, Jennifer Sparrow, Deborah Thomas, as well as two anonymous reviewers.They, however, are not to be blamed for the remaining mess.

1. In an earlier article I attempted to discuss Caribbean existence outsideof the parameters of morality and without an involvement in the potentiallytreacherous discussions about binaries such as right and wrong, good and evil(Henke 1997). In Aristotle, ethos is the character produced by moral habits. Simi-larly, both the words conscience and consciousness derive from the Latinconscire (to know, be aware of; from con, with, together, plus scire, to know).Because Caribbean moral space(s) involve constant shifts and trade-offs, the termeconomy was introduced in this context.

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2. Important arguments along the same line have been suggested byimportant Caribbean writers such as Wilson Harris, Edouard Glissant, PatrickChamoiseau, Derek Walcott, and others. In the following I will refer to some ofthis work.

3. By using the term subaltern I do not wish to invoke Spivaks misin-terpreted essay Can the Subaltern Speak? from which, in any case, she hasdistanced herself (see, e.g., Landry and McLean 1996). Rather, it is used in theGramscian sense that Meeks (2000, 2224) seems to propose.

4. This statement may be regarded as problematic and requiring someexplanation. In my view, there does already exist a Caribbean cultural discoursethat is largely embodied in the cultural practices, traditions, and everyday actionsof Caribbean peoples. To my mind, Caribbean scholars have not yet sufWcientlyrecognized and thematized these mostly performative and nonscriptural expres-sions of Caribbean thought. It is hoped this modest attempt at integrating theminto scholarly work will achieve some of the still missing recognition.

5. Among the notable exceptions to this tendency are intellectuals such asRex Nettleford, George Lamming, and Antonio Bentez-Rojo.

6. And for a moment we will overlook Csaires gendered concept of therationalizing human being.

7. In his essay Of Other Spaces, Foucault deWnes the term the followingway: There are probably in every culture, in every civilization, real placesplaces that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of societywhichare something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which thereal sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simulta-neously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of allplaces, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Becausethese places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reXect and speakabout, I shall call them by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias (1986, 27).

8. The situation here is similar to the dilemma of deconstructive thinking,described by Gayatri Spivak: Operating necessarily from the inside, she writes,borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of subversion from the oldstructure, borrowing them structurally, that is to say, without being able to isolatetheir elements and atoms, the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certainway falls prey to its own work (quoted in Landry and MacLean 1996, 7).

9. Thus, while in the Christian tradition current Jamaican moral valuescertainly are perceived as being ordained by God, traditional Ashanti beliefs holdthat God has no inXuence on peoples moral values (Mbiti 1999, 202). However,Ashanti was one of the main ethnic groups from which people were brought asslaves to Jamaica (Alleyne 1989, 44; Craton 1982, 125). The connection certainlyneeds a more systematic exploration, but the question arises whether Jamaicascurrent moral crisis does not also Wnd an explanation in these competing percep-tions of Gods role in the determination of human moral values.

10. This is not to argue that rational thought does not play the same rolein Caribbean discourse as it does for any other culture. My argument is simply

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that Caribbean thought is at different times and for different groups inXuenced bya variety of contending cosmologies, ontologies, and epistemologies. Any con-structive in-depth and prolonged communication between these systems is likelyto encounter implicit or explicit deWnitional boundaries at which point the dis-course inherently tends toward a resolution in irony and humor.

11. Yet another important, and often underappreciated, strategy in theCaribbean context is the marginality suffered by nonconforming individualismand eccentricity or the more or less real escape of (post)colonial madness. See,for example, Henke 1996, 6971; and Price 1998, 157217.

12. Despite several attempts to secure a copyright permission for the fewlines that the original version of this article intended to quote from his song, Spar-row was not willing to produce this permission. The reader is therefore asked toread the lyrics of the song on-line, where it can be found reproduced at a varietyof locations, e.g., at socanews.com/music/lyrics/melda(obeahwedding).shtml orat arts.yorku.ca/english/creet/ lyrics.html.

13. Cunumunu is a Trinidadian term for a stupid person. The word is alsoknown in Jamaica (and possibly other Caribbean countries) and is therefore prob-ably of West African origin. In Sparrows song, the term is pronounced with anl in place of the second n in cunumunu (koo-noo-mooloo).

14. Mbitis claim that African society does not know future (1999, 16) hasbeen proven wrong by a number of authors and subsequently intense debateshave developed over the nature of the African concept of time. See, for example,Beyaraza 2000.

15. The notion of ascetic rationalism was, of course, introduced by Weber(1973, 380). Since Protestant asceticism is fundamentally opposed to the danger ofa free and hedonistic enjoyment of wealth, the subversive power of liming is eas-ily discernible. Despite the impression given by Weber, however, we also haveto note that both privacy and the concomitant concept of individualism origi-nated in the aristocratic classes of feudal Europe. Only gradually, and with the tri-umph of capitalism, did these concepts become public goods in Europe.

16. Although Birth (1999, 130) mentions this aspect, his treatment of it doesnot get adequate coverage and is not sufWciently emphasized.

17. Exceptions support this general rule; in the case of Nevis, Abrahams(1968) mentions that there is very little community activity or feeling.

18. Other important instances of Caribbean communalism are child shift-ing, rotating savings and credit associations (partner or susu), family land,day-for-day labor, conviviality, and so on.

19. While community plays a strong role in Hinduism, there seems to be astronger emphasis on individualism than in traditional African culture and phi-losophy (see Khan 1996, 6). Community in Hinduism, moreover, seems to tran-scend anthropocentrism and to suggest a communion with the universe, a lessconcrete and more abstract or transcendental form of community.

20. For the aspects of universality and particularity in East Indian commu-nities in Trinidad, see Schwartz 1964.

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21. See, for instance, Csaires A Tempest (1999), Retamars Calban y otrosensayos (1979), Toumsons Trois Calibans (1981), or the creative oeuvre of GeorgeLamming, which centers on The Tempest.

22. It is important to note at this point that Brathwaite introduces what hecalls the Aerial persona. Aerial functions in his argument as a kind of prototypeAriel, an Ariel who aspires to, but cannot achieve, becoming his full self. Only inexceptional cases and for exceptional individuals (e.g., Jamaicas national heroSam Sharpe) was the successful entrance into the Euro-creolizing or ac/cultura-tive process made possible (Brathwaite 1977, 59/60). Still, the relationshipAriel/Aerial is not applied consistently throughout Brathwaites text. In his Con-versations with Nathaniel Mackey, Brathwaite describes Ariel as Prosperos spyingeyes, his communication apparat, police and television aerials (1999, 188). Arielhas a similarly (potentially) reactionary role in Retamars (1988) interpretation.

23. This seems also to be the way Csaire reads Ariel (see 1999, 2023).24. Edouard Glissant has consciously and brilliantly incorporated this as-

pect into his oeuvre. Consider, for example, Glissants thoughts about the land:I am struck by the fate of Xowers. The shapeless yielding to the shapely. As if theland had rejected its essence to concentrate everything in appearance. It can beseen but not smelt. Also these thoughts on Xowers are not a matter of lamentinga vanished idyll in the past. But it is true that the fragile and fragrant Xowerdemanded in the past daily care from the community that acted on its own. TheXower without fragrance endures today, is maintained in form only. Perhaps thatis the emblem of our wait? We dream of what we will cultivate in the future, andwe wonder vaguely what the new hybrid that is already being prepared for uswill look like, since in any case we will not rediscover them as they were, themagnolias of former times (1989, 52). While in the context of the hybrid, ambigu-ous moral situation of the Caribbean the dream for the Xowers fragrancebecomes the dominant register of thought and action, the rampant materialism ofmuch of the rest of the world appears to rush in a pseudoteleological frenzy fromone invention to the next, from one record to the next, from growth to moregrowth, with inner and external peace of woman/man with herself and betweenwoman/man and nature being as remote as ever before. While much of theCaribbean is certainly infected by the same bug, it nevertheless seems to runagainst its deep inner being. If Novaliss mythic Blue Flower was ever to befound, it would grow somewhere in the rainforest or along the seashores of theCaribbean islands.

25. This is also an obvious concern of Scott. See, for example, his introduc-tion to Refashioning Futures (1999).

26. Creole and creolization are by no means clear and unambiguousconcepts. Space considerations prevent a problematization of these terms, andI am using them here simply in order to point to the fundamentally hybrid, inter-mediary, and multilayered nature of Caribbean social systems. For a morecomprehensive treatment, see Shepherd and Richards (2002), in particular theexcellent chapters by Nigel Bolland and Carolyn Allen.

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27. The operative word here is may. Obviously the debate about whetherwhat is technologically possible shall also be what is morally allowed is currentlyin full swing.

28. I am thinking here in particular about a highly controversial speech in1998 by the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk (his Elmau Lecture), replies byJrgen Habermas, Robert Spaemann, and subsequent interventions by the Ger-man chancellor and Bundesprsident, among others (see also Jongen 2001). As faras I can see, the Sloterdijk lecture is not yet available in English, at least not on theInternet; however, one source that includes debate about his ideas and morerecent texts can be found at http://www.goethe.de/uk/los/symp/enindex.htm.

29. I am well aware that there are exciting new developments under waywith regard to the development of a Caribbean philosophy, some of which werealluded to in this text.

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111 Rita Raley eEmpires

151 Cesare Casarino and Antonio Negri Its a Powerful Life:A Conversation on Contemporary Philosophy

Book Reviews

187 Spectral Evidence:The Photography of Trauma byUlrich BaerJakki Spicer

191 Marxism, Modernity, and Postcolonial Studies edited byCrystal Bartolovich and Neil LazarusStephen Groening

195 Books Received

201 Contributors

Correction: The title of Holger Henkes essay in Cultural Critique 56 contains anerror. The correct title should be Ariels Ethos: On the Moral Economy ofCaribbean Existence. Cultural Critique regrets the error.

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Correction