belize || celebrating autonomy: the development of garifuna ritual on st vincent

CELEBRATING AUTONOMY: THE DEVELOPMENT OF GARIFUNA RITUAL ON ST VINCENTAuthor(s): BYRON FOSTERSource: Caribbean Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 3/4, BELIZE (SEPTEMBER & DECEMBER, 1987),pp. 75-83Published by: University of the West Indies and Caribbean QuarterlyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40654135 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 00:19

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

University of the West Indies and Caribbean Quarterly are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve andextend access to Caribbean Quarterly.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.21 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 00:19:14 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=uwi

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cariquar

http://www.jstor.org/stable/40654135?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


75

CELEBRATING AUTONOMY: THE DEVELOPMENT OF GARIFUNA

RITUAL ON ST VINCENT

by

BYRON FOSTER

Garifuna history on St Vincent The process of the development of the Garifuna community on St Vincent comprised two basic phases: first, from 1517 to 1676, the integration of African escapees into the island's Island Carib communities, second, from 1676-1796, the development of autonomous Garifuna (Afro-Carib) maroon communities following a split between them and the Island Carib.

While Garifuna history is generally thought to have begun with the wreck of a slaver in 1635, C. Gullick has recently suggested that the Afro-Carib community on St Vincent had begun to develop more than a century earlier.1 Gullick points out that African slaves were first brought to the Caribbean in 1517 and that during the ensuing years - the

early phase of Spanish colonialism - the Island Carib were sufficiently militarily powerful to raid and plunder the settlements of the Spanish, capturing their slaves. In 1529, for example, the Carib raided San Juan, Puerto Rico taking 25 Indians and Africans

captive. There are two further indications of the sixteenth century integration of Africans into St Vincentian Island Carib society. Firstly, Breton's 1665 Carib-French dictionary gives three Dominican Island Carib terms (chibarali, cachionna and

yabouloupou) for the children of marriages between Carib men and négresses, suggest- ing that there were earlier precedents for such marriages.2 Secondly, Pr de la Borde recorded in 1674 that while the bulk of the Africans on St Vincent derived from the wreck of a slaver, smaller numbers had been either runaway slaves or slaves captured by the Carib.3 The evidence suggests, then, that Garifuna society had its roots within the sixteenth century communities of the Island Carib; probably heavily populated Island Carib communities each containing a handful of Afro-Caribs.

The implications are important. These early Afro-Caribs were, if they regarded themselves as a group at all, only a small minority, integrated into the communities of the then dominant Island Carib. They may have retained elements of the various West African cultures to which they had belonged, but their social and demographic



76

conditions - essentially their numerical inferiority and probable geographic dispersal - make the formation during this early stage of a new and complex cult of the dead unlikely.

The period (1635-1654/1676) also began as one of African integration amongst the Island Carib but it differed from that of the initial phase in that the incoming Africans, being far more numerous, were probably able to maintain a cultural repertoire which included African, as well as Island Carib elements. The period began with the wreck off St Vincent in 1635 of a slaver of Dutch or Spanish provenance; the escaping slaves, of Ibo and Efik origin, were brought to St Vincent by the Island Carib.5 There, according to Belizean Garinagu today, the escapees were well treated by the Island Carib; according to a colonial account possibly based on an Island Carib version of events, they were enslaved by the Amerindians.6 Whatever the circumstances of integration were, this newly arrived, substantial body of Africans assimilated, as had their sixteenth century predecessors, the bulk of Island Carib culture. This assimilation, together with further Afro-Carib marriages, must be seen as an essentially protective strategy on the part of the Africans, who were thereby allying themselves with the then numerous and militarily powerful Island Carib population. In 1654, however, nineteen years after the wreck of the slaver, the Island Carib on St Vincent were substantially reduced in number by a concerted French attack on their coastal villages. The fact that the Island Carib rather than the Afro-Carib were the victims of the French attack suggests that the Afro-Carib had already formed communities in the island's interior. If this was in fact the case, the Afro-Carib would in all likelihood have, by 1654, begun to refer to themselves as Garifuna - an African modification of Kar if una, the Island Carib term for themselves - and have begun to develop their distinctive ritual sequence for the dead, incorporating elements of Island Carib religion. Dugu, then, may well date from this early phase of autonomy.

C. Gullick, citing a colonial account of 1795, suggests that the Afro-Carib rebelled against and split from the Island Carib in about 1676; the account suggests that the rebellion was sparked off by the Island Carib plan to kill all black male children born in order to halt the trend towards black numerical superiority. Certainly, there was armed conflict between the Afro- and Island Carib, but the colonial account of a 'sudden insurrection of the Blacks, who massacred such of the (Island) Charaibs as they could take by surprise, and then fled, accompanied or followed by their wives and children, to the woods and rocks which cover the high mountains to the north-east of St Vincent' leaves unanswered the question of how the Africans had increased so rapidly in number in the forty-one years since the wreck of the slaver as to numerically threaten the Island Carib, whose numbers on St Vincent were put at 10,000 in 1653 and still at over 2,000 in 1700. There seem to be three possibilities: first, the number of Africans captured by the Island Carib and brought to St Vincent prior to 1635 may have been greater than has been supposed; second, there may have been an additional influx of Africans from a wrecked slaver in 1675, just prior to the purported rebellion and third, the number of Yoruba, Fon, Fanti-Ashanti and Congo escapees with whom the Garifuna rebels reportedly joined forces in north-eastern



77

St Vincent may have been more substantial than has been realized.7 These three possibilities are not mutually exclusive. The implications for this assessment of the development of Garifuna ritual are important.

Whatever the circumstances, it is certain that a rift developed between the Afro-Carib (i.e. Garifuna) and the Island Carib, and that the Garifuna were militarily superior because in 1700 the Island Carib requested, through the Governor of Martinique, French assistance against the Garifuna. The French response was to take Island Carib land in return for protection against the Garifuna, a tactic which probably contributed as much as did Garifuna attacks to the drastic reduction of the Island Carib and their mass exodus from St Vincent for Trinidad in 1740.

The outcome was that by the mid-eighteenth century the Garifuna were the effective owners of substantial lands on St Vincent: a map of 1764 shows substantial territory, particularly in the north-east, occupied by five Garifuna sub-tribes. Events had turned full circle: having contributed to the supplanting of the Island Carib, the descendants of slave cargoes had become the autonomous owners of north-eastern St Vincent. Small wonder that the modern dugu rite harks back to the golden age on St Vincent.

The threat to this newly won autonomy by the British annexation of St Vincent in 1763 led to several skirmishes between the Garifuna and the British from 1768 onwards, and it was in fact the Garifuna realization that the British would eventually erode their autonomy which led to the Garifuna attack on British settlements on the island in 1795: to war, and finally to defeat.

For reasons cited above - notably that prior to 1654/1676 the incoming Africans were integrated within Island Carib communities and were in the process of assimilating Island Carib culture - the development of anything more than a proto-dugu prior to 1654/1676 is unlikely. As a modern Garifuna spirit medium puts it: The Africans made dugu', and they did so in the latter part of the seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries - the period of autonomy.

Ritual

Dugu was for Garifuna eyes - no' European has left any record of having witnessed its performance on St Vincent. It was a collective Garifuna representation and an innovation. Because the ritual was not designed with Europeans in mind it was not one of those elements of Island Carib culture assimilated by the Garifuna in order to 'make out their identity and confirm the succession (to Island Carib rights in the land)', as the colonial commissioner for the region, W. Young, put it in 1795. 10 To understand what dugu was during the process of its inception we have to look first at the nature of the group which developed it: at the pan West African composition of the Garifuna and the group's division into sub-tribes. Indeed, the nature of the group is as indivisible from the ritual it constructed as the political context of its development (autonomy under threat).

It is reckoned that the African element of the emerging Garifuna community comprised Ibo, Efik, Yoruba, Fon, Fanti-Ashanti and Congo personnel. Moreover, some of



78

these maroons, since they were encountered in the north-east by the Garifuna following their split with the Island Carib, had not apparently lived amongst the latter. Yet only a handful of Garifuna words are traceably African while the bulk of the modern Garifuna lexicon can be readily traced to the Island Carib language recorded by Breton. Aside, then, from the obvious necessity for the maroons to adopt a common language in the autonomous north-east there was also the need for the culturally hybrid group to per- ceive of and express itself as a group. This need can only have been intensified by the group's division by the mid-eighteenth century into five sub-groups (presided over in war by the paramount chief Chatoyer) for we are told that there was considerable sub- group rivalry. It is plausible, and likely that if dugu operated then as it does today and has done since 1840, the ritual involved the participation of Garinagu from different geographic locations: from the various sub-tribal districts in the case of mid-eighteenth century St Vincent. This is not to say that any individual or group of Garinagu con- sciously created a ritual whose effect was to represent the collectivity and to provide a system of ritual communication between its component sub-groups. Rather the ritual developed as part of the highly complex process of expansion, formation of kinship and marriage systems and differentiation into sub-groups (polities). It is probable, however, that dugu is the product of a single mediumistic tradition in which the spirit mediums, selecting initiates and passing on knowledge of ritual techniques as they do today, had room for innovation within the part African, part Island Carib symbolic system at their disposal.

It is from the area of ritual symbolism that we can glean the hardest facts about dugu by comparing the rite as it is reproduced today with the Island Carib ritual system. This comparison brings to light both similarities and innovations the examination of which is likely to elucidate the social meaning of dugu on St Vincent. This paper demonstrates how Island Carib shamanistic curing was transformed into Garifuna mediumistic ritual for the dead, and how the Island Carib focus on the celestial bodies, particularly the moon as the source of fertility was transformed into a Garifuna emphasis on fertility through the earth and the dead it contained. Prior to looking at these transformations, however, it is helpful to look at the continuity between the Island Carib and the Garifuna diagnostic seances which, for the Garifuna, formed the starting point of the process of dugu, and at other elements of Island Carib ritual practices which the Garifuna did retain. A tabulation of the elements of the Island Carib and modern Garifuna seances shows clearly the continuity between the two.

Island Carib seance Garifuna seance

performed by shaman (boye) performed by spirit medium (buyai)

performed at night performed at night

performed in a circular performed in the medium's hut built onto an oval sanctuary built onto a men's house (tabouyaba) rectangular cult house (dabuyaba)



79

audience, aligned along audience, seated in main hall sides of hut, presented of cult house, present offerings of cassava and offerings of raw rum and cash cassava beer

shaman lit cigar and medium blows cigar smoke through summoned spirit helper doorways and ascends to the roof

spirit helper (ioulouca) spirit helper (hiuruha) descends and descended and responded responds to questions concerning to questions concerning affliction the afflicted and warfare

spirit helper stamped his spirit helper referred to as stamping foot on the ground prior his foot on the ground prior to to departure departure in leading spirit medium's

account of her initiation-affliction13

The Garifuna mediums evidently felt no compunction in making alterations to the seance whose procedures they had learned amongst the Island Carib, perhaps because the symbolism of the seance is elemental, focusing only on the descent of the spirit helpers and the ascension of the medium. The radical departure comes in the mode of curing: the Island Carib shamans, having ascertained that the sickness was curable, either blew on the affected part of the patient and removed palmetto splinters or sucked the offending poison and vomited it. The only ensuing ritual was that held for the shaman once the sick were healed. By contrast the Garifuna seance sets in motion the process of dugu, a cult rite which, as such, is performed by a spirit medium; at the modern seance the medium's spirit helper may diagnose the dead (gubida) as the cause of affliction and recommend that dugu be performed to placate the dead.

Dugu was constructed with Island Carib elements, West African elements and innovations. The language used in the ritual is the day-to-day Garifuna language appended during chanted songs with archaic terms of Island Carib origin; there is nothing of demonstrably African linguistic derivation. The term dugu itself, denoting 'treading down', recalls the Island Carib practice of treading down the earth on the grave at the conclusion of secondary funerals.14 There are two further indications that dugu retains elements of Island Carib mortuary rites: first, the use during the focal, placatory mali dance of cotton sashes dyed red with rocou. In mali, as the medium and drummers stoop to play their instruments - calabash rattles and drums respectively - close to the mud floor of the cult house to commune with the dead, so the dancers, mostly women, stoop to wave reddened sashes to and fro close to the ground in an apparent gesture of fare- well. There is little doubt, given the context, that these sashes are the descendants of those worn by Island Carib married women and removed on the death of their husbands.15 Second, the women's mournful abaimahani and the men's equivalent, arumahani, danced at intervals during dugu, were recorded by Breton for the Island Carib as abaimacani, 'danse' and aromancani, 'chanson' respectively.16 The indications are that those aspects of dugu which evoke the sadness of death originate in the lugubrious Island Carib system of mortuary rites.



80

But the focal mali dance at dugu is principally a matter of the entry of the rejuvenated and regenerative dead into the body of the cult house and, through possession trance, into the bodies of the dancers and its and associated features of dugu recall, through their similarity to Haitian voodoo, West Africa.

Dugu Haitain voodoo

libations poured into the ground libations poured into the ground close to the altar in the medium's in front of the altar sanctuary

anti-clockwise and clockwise anti-clockwise circles made prior circles formed during to voodoo performances adugurahani dance

fowl sacrificed in circle around fowl sacrificed, sometimes against centre point of cult house the centre post of the voodoo cult

house

the dead linger outside the cult the dead wander about outside the house and are drawn in by the voodoo sanctuary and are drawn in drumming by drums and songs

mali dance focuses on cardinal cardinal points of compass form points of compass elements of voodoo ritual structure17

Two further aspects of dugu are strongly reminiscent of. West Africa: music and possession trance. The call and response chanting of dugu is West African in style as is the style of drumming and the construction of the drums themselves - deer-skinned, unlike the open-ended drums of the Island Carib. Possession trance is, as 'Amongst African sects . . . solely induced by music and dancing' in contradistinction to the use of toxic substances to induce trance amongst Amerindian-influenced sects in Brazil.18

Dugu is thus an African celebration of death grafted onto fragments of the Island Carib system of solemn mortuary rites. There are, however, elements of the rite which I cannot yet trace to either source, notably the term gubida. This term - for the malevo- lent yet potent dead - may represent an innovation on the part of the St Vincentian Garifuna mediums. The concept of the potent dead is central to the development of dugu: on fertility and who controlled it.

The Garifuna selection of Island Carib and West African elements in the construction of dugu was not an arbitrary one, for in the Garifuna view, death is a time for mourning (lugubrious Island Carib laments and, latterly, requiem masses for the dead), and, being a moment of regeneration in the cycle of fertility, a time for exuberance (West African ecstatic possession). Neither was the process of the development of ideolo- gy an arbitrary one.



81

A central component of the ideologies of traditional societies at least is a portrayal of the society's position in history, particularly vis-a-vis other societies which it may have superseded or been superseded by. This portrayal often takes the form of symbolic 'statements' in ritual about the society's power to self-create and reproduce itself: about fertility. Garifuna ritual does and did take precisely this form. The Island Carib, despite the name given them, were not indigenous to the Lesser Antilles: They themselves were pointedly aware that they were conquerors who had supplanted the Arawak: they kept the skulls of the indigenes conquered by their original captain in caves at the edge of the sea.19 This was a fairly explicit sign that the Arawak had indeed been conquered. Yet as indigenes, the Arawak were still regarded by the Island Carib as residual controllers of fertility for they, the Arawak, were thought of as being the source of the powerful spirits possessing the Island Carib shamans. These spirit helpers were termed ioulouca: they 'multiplied the manioc' and were, being homonymous with ioulouca the rainbow serpent, apparently also regarded as bringers of rain, as givers of fertility. Yet Breton tells us that one of the Island Carib shamans' ioulouca 'says that he was formerly an Arawak'.20 And just as the Island Carib viewed the indigenous Arawak as residual controllers of fertility so the Garifuna implicitly recognized the potency of the spirits of the Island Carib whom they had supplanted: the Garifuna mediums co-opted the ioulouca of the Island Carib shamans as their own spirit helpers, merely altering the pronunciation to hiuruha.

Other Island Carib sources of fertility were retained but relegated to a secondary position in the hierarchy of spirit power: the moon as a source of potency for the Island Carib was displaced in ritual by the Garifuna emphasis on fertility through the dead in association with the earth (i.e. as gubida).

On examining more closely the Island Carib mythology which the incoming Africans encountered and essentially displaced, it is apparent that Island Carib creation myths - those dealing with the origin of fertility - sung at initiation, differed from island to island. That of the Dominican Island Carib placed the moon as the primordial ancestor: the moon, finding a girl sleeping, impregnated her; she gave birth to Hiali, who laid the foundation of the Carib nation. The hummingbird was chosen to take Hiali to his father, the moon and was rewarded with his beautiful head crest and multi-coloured feathers. Since the hummingbird was explicitly associated with women and in all probability, by virtue of his multi-chrome appearance, with ioulouca, the rainbow serpent, and since the Dominican Island Carib shamans repeated the hummingbird's journey to the moon, whose surface one described as 'like open rocks with trickling water everywhere', water as well as the moon may have been regarded as a source of fertility on Dominica. The St Vincentian Island Carib origin myth, recorded in 1674, only twenty years or so after the Dominican version, differed radically, though there is evidence to show that the St Vincentian Carib too associated the moon with fertility. On St Vincent, Longuo was regarded as the first man and Carib and nobody had made him. Descending from the skies, he made the earth an even texture. He then created the moon. From his navel and from a cut in his thigh came the first men. He then made fish from the scrapings of cassava and, after his death and resurrection, was found to have left a cassava garden behind him. Later on Coualina, the master of the beneficent chemeen spirits, drowned most of the Carib for failing to make offerings.21 Despite



82

the differences between these myths, and although water in the latter version is portrayed as destructive, the St Vincentian Carib shared with those of Dominica the association between the moon and fertility, for the Garifuna continue a practice in its con- nection which they brought from St Vincent: pregnant women remain indoors during eclipses of the moon, which is closely associated with the female reproductive cycle, lest the eclipse interrupt their pregnancy.22

The Garifuna adopted neither of these complex mythologies - with the exception of the moon/fertility association - but substituted through ritual an emphasis on the earth and the ancestors. Such features had not been absent from Island Carib religion, for the Island Carib regarded the bones of the dead as oracular; no cult, however, was offered to the dead, for Island Carib ritual focused on initiation, and there is no evidence that the dead were associated with fertility.23 By contrast the Garifuna placed the gubida - the powerful and dangerous dead in the ground - at the heart of their lengthy ritual sequence. They did so, not merely to assert their succession to the Island Carib. A combined ritual emphasis on the potent dead and the earth established their view of themselves as autochthons. Autochthons are those springing from the earth. At dugu the spirits of the dead are viewed as quite literally springing from the earth: it is the central function of modern Garifuna mediums and ritual drummers to enable the dead to perform this transition from the mud floor of the cult house into the bodies of the dancers whose subsequent trance dances are viewed as auspicious signs of ancestral pleasure and curing - of fertility.

Conclusion

The Garifuna buried their dead in St Vincentian soil and ritually portrayed them as springing from that soil. It is hard to imagine a ritual more appropriate for a maroon community whose whole existence as an autonomous entity depended on its right to hold the territory it had won. At periods in its Central American history the performance of dugu has been banned by the government of the Republic of Honduras and attacked by the established Church, possibly because the rite, in 'stating' descent from the land has also to imply that the Garifuna have control over their own dead. But that is another story.

NOTES

1. C. J. M. R. Gullick, Myths of a Minority. The Changing Traditions of the Vincentian Caribs, Assen, 1985, pp. 39-81. The historical data cited here derive from the latter work unless otherwise stated.

2. R. Breton, Dictionnaire Caraibe-Français, Auxerre, 1665, pp. 12-13. See also the translation of sections of Breton's dictionary by M. McKusick and P. Verin, Human Relations Area Files, 1958.

3. De la Borde, in L. Hennepin, 'Voyage ou Nouvelle Découverte d'un très grand pay dans l'Amérique', Amsterdam, 1712 cited by Gullick, op. cit. p. 45.

4. No sixteenth century population figures are available, but a very substantial population figure is suggested by that of 10,000 in 1653. Gullick, op. cit. p. 49.

5. R. Bastide, African Civilisations in the New World, London, 1971, p. 77. 6. Sir W. Young, 'An Account of the Black Charaibs in the Island of St Vincent's', London, 1795,

pp. 4-9. 7. Bastide, loc. cit.



83

8. Map by John Byres, 1764, in C. J. M. R. Gullick, 'Exiled from St Vincent. The Development of Black Carib Culture in Central America up to 1945', Malta, 1976, p. 23.

9. Numerous factors militate against a Central American origin for dugu, though there have clearly been changes, as suggested in B. Foster, 'Marriage in Death. Ritual Representations of Belizean Garifuna Society', unp. Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge, 1983. Briefly these factors are (a) Dugu is reported to have been performed in Central America in 1840, only forty years after the arrival in Central America, (b) Dugu is performed along the Honduran, Guatemalan and Belizean Atlantic coastlines by communities many of whom were segregated shortly after the arrival in Central America; such dispersed communities could scarcely have developed the same ritual independently, (c) the spirit medium's statement cited, viz. that the 'Africans (by which she means those on St Vincent) made dugu.' (d) the rite's clearly Island Carib elements mentioned could hardly have gone unpractised on St Vincent and been resurrected from memory in Central America.

10. W. Young, loc. cit. 11. Gullick, 1976, p. 22. 12. See T. Young, 'Narrative of a Residence on the Mosquito Shore . . .' London, 1842, pp. 131-

134. 13. Data on Island Carib seance from R. Breton and A. de la Paix, 'Relation de L'Ile de

Guadeloupe', trans, by T. Turner, Human Relations Area Files, 1958; R. P. du Tertre, 'Histoire Generale des Antilles Habitées par les Francais', Paris, 1667, p. 396 and De la Borde, op. cit. p. 546. On the modem Garifuna seance: author's field notes, Dangriga District, Belize, 1977-1979.

14. D. M. Taylor, 'The Black Carib of British Honduras', New York, 1951 and B. Foster, op. cit. pp. 163-170.

15. Gullick, 1976, p. 13. 16. Breton, op. cit. pp. 54, 66. 17. Data on voodoo: A. Metraux, 'Voodoo in Haiti', London, 1959, pp. 162-177; M. J. Herskovits,

'Life in a Haitian Valley', New York, 1937, pp. 160-161. 18. Bastide, op. cit. p. 83. 19. Breton, op. cit. p. 230. 20. Breton, op. cit. p. 284. 21. Gullick, 1985, pp. 26-28. 22. Field notes, 1977-1979. 23. Tertre, op. cit. p. 369, de la Borde, op. cit. p. 546.

AUTHOR'S POSTSCRIPT

The term gubiba may derive from cumbito, used in Guatemalan Spanish to mean 'a deep con- tainer.' The root of the latter term is cumbo, which is used to mean both 'goal' and 'grave.' Hence 'Se fue al cumbo' means, 'He (specifically someone whom the speaker did not care for) has gone to the grave' (i.e. He's been buried'). This apparently Central American origin of the term gubida need not imply a Central American origin for the concept of the malevolant dead, for Garinagua borrow imagin- atively from Spanish, English and Belizean Creole; moreover, they also use Spanish terms in addition to indigenous terms to refer to their own ideological concepts. Hence a ghost may be referred to as ufie - i.e. from the Island Carib opoyem, ghost, - and as pantu - from the Spanish, espanto, ghost.



belize || celebrating autonomy: the development of garifuna ritual on st vincent

Documents