An Effigy for the Enslaved: Jonkonnu in Jamaica and Belisario's Sketches of Character

Abstract

In 1838, less than one year before the enslaved of Jamaica were fully emancipated, Isaac Mendes Belisario completed his Sketches of Character, a set of lithographs that today constitutes one of the first visual representations of the Jamaican Jonkonnu performance from the pre-emancipation period. This essay considers the links between Jonkonnu and similar performances from the African continent, asking what Jonkonnu meant to the largest group of African-born slaves at the time Belisario finished his Sketches of Character. Ultimately, Jonkonnu is best understood as a mortuary ritual that both mourns the moment of enslavement and provides for the possibility of social resurrection within a new social order.

Notes

The enslaved were granted partial emancipation in the form of ‘apprenticeships’ in 1834, but were not fully emancipated until 1 August 1838. For a history of emancipation in Jamaica, see Michael Craton, Empire, Enslavement and Freedom in the Caribbean (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1997).

Marly, or, The Life of a Planter in Jamaica (Glasgow: Printed for R. Griffin, 1828), 288; Cynric Williams, A Tour through the Island of Jamaica, 2nd ed. (London: Thomas Hunt, Edward Change and Co., 1827), 22–23.

Sir Hans Sloane, A Voyage to … Jamaica, 1687–1689 (London: Printed by B.M. for the author, 1707), xlix.

Edward Long, The History of Jamaica (London: T. Lowndes, 1774).

Richard D.E. Burton, Afro-Creole: Power, Opposition and Play in the Caribbean (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 65.

Regarding the revival of Jonkonnu in the immediate post-independence period, see Cheryl Ryman, ‘Jonkonnu: A Neo-African Form’, Jamaica Journal 17, no. 1 (1978): 13–23.

For work by historians, see, for example, Elizabeth A. Fenn, ‘A Perfect Equality Seemed to Reign: Slave Society and Jonkonnu’, North Carolina Historical Review 65, no. 2 (1988): 127–153; Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Michael Craton, ‘Decoding Pitchy-Patchy’, Slavery & Abolition 16, no. 1 (1995): 14–44; Monica Schuler, Alas, Alas, Kongo: A Social History of Indentured African Immigrants into Jamaica (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). For work by anthropologists, see, for example, Martha Beckwith, Christmas Mummings in Jamaica (New York: American Folklore Society, 1928) and Black Roadways (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1929); Robert Dirks, The Black Saturnalia (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1987); Kenneth M. Bilby, ‘More Than Met the Eye’, in Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, ed. Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz (New Haven, CT: Yale Center for British Art, 2007), 121–136. For work by sociologists, see, for example, Mervyn Alleyne, Roots of Jamaican Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1988); Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1967). For work by musicologists, see, for example, Helen H. Roberts, ‘Some Drums and Drum Rhythms of Jamaica’, Natural History 24 (1924): 241–251; Timothy Rommen, ‘Home Sweet Home’, Black Music Research Journal 19, no. 1 (1999): 71–92; Vivian Nina Michelle Wood, ‘Rushin’ Hard and Runnin' Hot' (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1995). For work by performance studies scholars, see, for example, Errol Hill, The Jamaican Stage, 1655–1900 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992); Keith Gordon Wisdom, ‘Bahamian Junkanoo: An Act in a Modern Social Drama’ (PhD diss., University of Georgia, 1985).

For work by art historians, see, for example, Ivy Baxter, The Arts of an Island (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1970); Judith Bettelheim, ‘The Afro-Jamaican Jonkonnu Festival’ (PhD diss., Yale University, 1979); Judith Bettelheim and John W. Nunley, Caribbean Festival Arts (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988); Robert Farris Thompson, ‘Charters for the Spirit’, in Barringer et al., Art and Emancipation, 89–102; Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz, ‘Sketches of Memory’, in Barringer et al., Art and Emancipation, 103–120; Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700–1840 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).

Belisario linked Jonkonnu to the French term gens inconnu, though this is an unlikely origin for the term because the French influence in Jamaica was weak prior to 1794, and the term appeared at least as early as 1769. See Isaac Mendes Belisario, Sketches of Character: In Illustration of the Habits, Occupation, and Costume of the Negro Population in the Island of Jamaica (Kingston, 1837–1838; reprinted in Barringer et al., Art and Emancipation). Ivy Baxter has linked the term to the use of a canoe on a performer's headdress, although most headdresses were not in the shape of a canoe at all, but rather in the shape of a house. See Ivy Baxter, Arts of an Island, 219. W.J. Gardner was among the first to suggest the connection between the term ‘Jonkonnu’ and the African merchant John Connu. See W.J. Gardner, A History of Jamaica from Its Discovery by Columbus to the Year 1872 (London, 1909).

Frederick Cassidy links Jonkonnu to the Twi term for ‘orphan’, as well as to the Ewe word for ‘deadly magician’. See Frederick Cassidy, Jamaica Talk (London: Macmillan, 1961), 259–260. Robert Farris Thompson suggests a possible KiKongo source for the term. See Thompson, ‘Charters for the Spirit’, 89.

Nigel O. Bolland reminds us, however, that creolisation is ‘not a homogenising process, but rather a process of contention between people who are members of social formations and carriers of cultures’. Nigel O. Bolland, ‘Creolisation and Creole Societies: A Cultural Nationalist View of Caribbean Social History’, in Questioning Creole: Creolisation Discourses in Caribbean Culture, ed. Verene A. Shepherd and Glen L. Richards (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2002), 38. On the topic of creolisation in Jamaica, see also Edward Kamau Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); Rex Nettleford, Caribbean Cultural Identity: The Case of Jamaica (Kingston: Ian Randle, 1980).

Other characters in the Jonkonnu performance have been explored in more detail elsewhere. See, in particular, Baxter, Arts of an Island; Ryman, ‘Jonkonnu’; Craton, ‘Decoding Pitchy-Patchy’.

See the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database at http://www.slavevoyages.org. See also Patterson, Sociology of Slavery, 124; Alleyne, Roots of Jamaican Culture, 53.

According to Martha Beckwith and Richard D.E. Burton, Jonkonnu had the greatest number of participants and most elaborate performances in this period. After emancipation, Jonkonnu experienced a sharp decline in popularity. See Beckwith, Black Roadways, 150; Burton, Afro-Creole, 64–67.

James Clifford, ‘Partial Truths’, in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 1–26.

See E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939).

Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (1941; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958).

Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992). The essay was presented at the Scholar Lecture Symposium, ‘Creole Societies in the Americas and Africa’, in 1973, and was first published in 1976 as An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: A Caribbean Perspective (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1976).

Burton, Afro-Creole, 4.

See Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Global Transformations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). For an excellent summary of other critical work on the ‘culture concept’, see Robert Brightman, ‘Forget Culture: Replacement, Transcendence, Relexification’, Cultural Anthropology 10, no. 4 (1995): 509–546.

R.B. LePage, Jamaican Creole (London: Macmillan, 1960); Patterson, Sociology of Slavery; Philip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). These demographies are also summarised in Alleyne, Roots of Jamaican Culture. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database contains the most recent demographies in an easily searchable database. It is based on David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, eds., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Alleyne, Roots of Jamaican Culture, 29–33.

See the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. See also David Eltis and David Richardson, eds., Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).

Jamaica was a major centre for the trade in slaves to the USA and throughout the Caribbean. See Curtin, Atlantic Slave Trade, 25.

See the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.

In particular, see Sheila Barnett, ‘Jonkonnu Pitchy Patchy’, Jamaica Journal 13 (1979): 18–32. Baxter, Arts of an Island; Ryman, ‘Jonkonnu’.

Ryman, ‘Jonkonnu’.

Thompson, ‘Charters for the Spirit’, 95.

Ibid., 89.

See also Mary Elizabeth Thomas, Jamaica and Voluntary Laborers from Africa (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1974).

On the distinction between ‘culture’ and ‘cultural’, and why ‘cultural’ is largely regarded as less reifying than ‘culture’, see Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

Herskovits, Myth, 10.

Ibid., 110–142.

Sloane, Voyage, xlviii–xlix.

See Monica Blackmun Visonà, Robin Poynor, Herbert M. Cole, Michael D. Harris, Rowland Abiodun, and Suzanne Preston Blier, A History of Art in Africa (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 106–123, 228–273.

Long, History of Jamaica, 425.

Ibid, 424.

Monk Lewis, Journal of a West Indian Proprietor (London, 1834), 51–59.

Williams, Tour, 25.

Belisario, Sketches of Character.

Ibid.

Robert Brain and Adam Pollock, Bangwa Funerary Sculpture (London: Duckworth, 1971), 26; Daryll Forde, introduction to Efik Traders of Old Calabar, ed. Daryll Forde (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), vii.

Stephen D. Behrendt, A.J.H. Latham, and David Northrup, The Diary of Antera Duke: An Eighteenth-Century African Slave Trader (New York: Oxford University Press USA, 2010).

Donald C. Simmons, ‘An Ethnographic Sketch and Notes’, in Forde, Efik Traders, 4.

See David Northrup, Trade without Rulers: Pre-Colonial Economic Development in South-Eastern Nigeria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).

Kanna K. Nair, Politics and Society in South-Eastern Nigeria (London: Frank Cass, 1972), 18.

See Malcolm Ruel, Leopards and Leaders (New York: Tavistock, 1969).

Patterson, Sociology of Slavery, 244–245; Barnett 1979, 24–26; Burton, Afro-Creole, 245–246; Ryman, ‘Jonkonnu’.

Martinez-Ruiz, ‘Sketches of Memory’, 105.

Here, I am using the term ‘men’ because the Leopard society performers were never women, nor was a woman ever observed performing the central character of Jonkonnu.

In rare circumstances, the privileged members of the Leopard society were sold into slavery, as when competition among chapters led to deception within the society. This probably constituted only an extremely small percentage of the enslaved men brought to Jamaica.

See, in particular, Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereignty and Bare Life (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

Simmons, ‘Ethnographic Sketch’, 4–7.

Antera Duke, ‘The Diary of Antera Duke, 1785–88’, in Forde, Efik Traders, 71–72. The most elite could also read and write English, and several documents by African merchants written in pidgin English have survived.

Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit (New York: Random House, 1983), 227.

Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 5.

Ibid.

Ibid., 6.

Ibid., 38–39.

Ibid., 41.

Williams, Tour, 22–23. See Martinez-Ruiz, ‘Sketches of Memory’, 114; Burton, Afro-Creole, 71; Ryman, ‘Jonkonnu’, 19.

Joseph R. Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 14.

Ibid., 39.

Belisario, Sketches of Character.

Throughout Africa, Europeans are regarded not as racially ‘white’ but as ‘pink’ or even ‘red’ – a description that more accurately reflects the appearance of Caucasian skin, particularly of those who have spent months in the hot sun of Africa or the Caribbean. On the white mask, see Martinez-Ruiz, ‘Sketches of Memory’.

Brathwaite, Creole Society in Jamaica, 235.

Visonà et al., History of Art, 302–303. See also Robert Farris Thompson, African Art in Motion (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974).

Visonà et al., History of Art, 310. The text notes only that this panel belonged to a ‘trading society’ and is likely to date to the early nineteenth century. It is extremely likely that this anonymous ‘trading society’ was, in fact, a chapter of the Leopard society, but at the very least it was a society with a similar function.

The question of where the ‘canoe’ in the term ‘John Canoe’ comes from might be answered by further research on this panel and others like it. Perhaps early performances of Jonkonnu involved the use of a canoe or ship headdress, and only later was the form changed to that of the great house.

Roach, Cities of the Dead, 36.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laura M. Smalligan

Laura M. Smalligan recently received her PhD in the History of Art from Yale University. Email: [email protected]