Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

Abstract

Portobelo, Panama is a small town located on the Caribbean coast of Panama whose tourism reflects a cultural heritage rooted in Spanish colonialism and African resistance. Once a nexus for trade in the Spanish colonial world, contemporary Portobelo is an Afro-Latin community known for its natural beaches, colonial forts, a festival dedicated to El Nazareno (the “Black Christ”), and an Afro-Latin carnival tradition called “Congo.” With Congo carnival as its anchor, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea is a work of creative fiction that responds to this issue’s theme of African diasporic tourisms by traveling between the lived social reality of local Congo practitioners and the imagined reality prospective tourists encounter in travel literature. Drawn from 16 years of ethnographic research in Portobelo as well as my roots in the U.S south, “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” introduces readers to three fictionalized generations of Congo practitioners in the midst of Carnival celebrations when a U.S. African American missionary student arrives in the town. It rehearses the potential discursive and physical violence of rendering sophisticated Black cultural spaces, traditions, and bodies as ludic, laughable, and dangerous.

Keywords:

• Afro-Colonial
• Afro-Latin
• Afro-Panamanian
• Black Diaspora tourism
• carnival
• Congo traditions
• creative fiction
• Panama
• Portobelo

Notes

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995).

According to personal interviews and my own observations over the past seven years, the role of the Queen is to provide central leadership to the Congo organization, to gather the group when they agree to perform for a special occasion, and to act as their main organizational contact person. In the first performance of the Congo drama, “El Diablo Tun Tun,” the Devil attempts to capture the Queen, the seat of Congo power, but the Congos help her trick him and subdue him before he is able to do so. The three most important primary characters in the Congo drama are the Queen, the Major Devil, and Pajarito.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Renée Alexander Craft

Renée Alexander Craft is an Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a joint appointment in the Department of Communication and Curriculum in Global Studies. For the past 16 years, her research and creative projects have centered on an Afro-Latin community located in Portobelo, Panama who call themselves and their carnival performance tradition “Congo.” She has completed three projects that reflect this focus: an ethnographic monograph titled When the Devil Knocks: The Congo Tradition and the Politics of Blackness in 20th Century Panama, a digital humanities project titled Digital Portobelo: Art + Scholarship + Cultural Preservation (digitalportobelo.org), and a novel based in large part on her field research titled She Looks Like Us.