Tupac Shakur as Ogou Achade: Hip hop anger and postcolonial rancour read from the other side

Abstract

In this essay, I offer a thought experiment by figuring Tupac Shakur as an icon of interrogation of the post-industrial condition from within the idiom of diasporic possession cult vision, ‘reading’ his polyvalence as manifestation of the African Ogou, Orisha of iron and anger, politics and its discontents, auguring urban desperation for underground meaning. The effort is one of challenge to Western pretension to tame trauma as tautology, by tattooing the drive to bifurcate morality into good and evil with an older and more indigenous sounding of oppression, privileging paradoxical complexity as a wiser ‘sign’ of human maturity and spiritual vitality.

Keywords:

• hip hop
• indigenous
• diasporic
• possession
• vodou
• santeria

Notes

1. The way many of our institutional processes continue to function as de facto ‘transfer payments’, accumulating profit in corporate ledgers, filling executive pockets and building better McMansions, in part, by funnelling already meagre resources away from communities of disadvantage, is patent. I have elsewhere outlined the process ranging from Social Security payouts to ‘shadow-banking’ predation, from gentrifying takeover of core city property to prison industrial complex job incubation, from disparate pay for the same effort to exponential differences in net worth. The focus of the unfolding subprime loan debacle on largely black and Latino mortgagees is just more of the same – a structural interweaving of middle-class prosperity and lower class poverty whose history and intractability remains definitive of social relations inside this country and a rough parable of US relations with the rest of the globe. Here, I will not further press the point, but rather presume it.

2. See Perkinson (2001, 2005).

3. Hebrew prophets were notorious for their cryptic theatricalisations of political dilemmas facing the nation, whether in the form of Isaiah going naked for three years in the public square as sign of coming exile, Ezekiel baking his barley over dried human dung as portent of Yahweh's impeachment of the nation's unjust prosperity, or Jeremiah as celibate in lifelong disparagement of Israel's false sense of domestic security (Is. 20: 1–6; Ezek. 4: 9–13; Jer. 16; 1–4). Isaiah, in particular, invoked Assyria's arising as a mighty flood soon to inundate Israel's false tranquillity (Is. 8: 5–8).

4. See my ‘Ogu's Iron or Jesus' Irony’, 570–2, 586; Long, 110, 137–9, 177–8, 193–5.