Ariel's Ethos: On the Moral Economy of Caribbean ExperienceAuthor(s): Holger HenkeSource: Cultural Critique, No. 56 (Winter, 2004), pp. 33-63Published by: University of Minnesota PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354716Accessed: 13/12/2010 11:02

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=umnpress.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

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 support@jstor.org.

University of Minnesota Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to CulturalCritique.

http://www.jstor.org

ARIEL'S ETHOS ON 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 people along any particular path.

-Jiddu Krishnamurti

Few intellectuals and organic philosophers in the Caribbean will doubt that the region is in a severe moral and ethical crisis at this historical juncture. And yet, making this assertion presupposes the existence of an indigenous moral and ethical matrix against which

such a judgment can be made. More often than not, however, pre- cisely this existence is concealed from the discourse about society and moral development in the region. The following essay pursues- perhaps too ambitiously-a number of simultaneous objects. First, it intends to highlight some of the elements of what could perhaps be called the Caribbean ethic/ethos. In this effort, the initial guiding questions are: What are the elements that circumscribe Caribbean

thought? What are the motives for action? And what are the ethics of the people inhabiting the Caribbean? Later, I will read this (recon- structed) ethos/ethic against Shakespeare's play The Tempest, in par- ticular against the figures of Ariel and (to a lesser extent) Trinculo. Both "texts," the Caribbean ethos and the Shakespearean figures, may (and I choose this word carefully, as I am setting out to explore subtle connections and discontinuities) put each other into perspec- tive, withdraw each other's legitimacy or basic assumptions, or rein- force common premises. Second, I will argue for a view of Ariel that differs somewhat from the predominant interpretation by postcolonial

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

34 | HOLGER HENKE

writers. This view will direct the way in which the Shakespearean

figures are deployed as a lens through which I choose to consider issues pertaining to the moral economy of the Caribbean. Third, the

essay is an attempt to utilize different-sometimes deliberately dis-

jointed-registers of writing with which to map the moral landscape of Caribbean existence. Since Caribbean existence is circumscribed

by a multiplicity of different discourses, themes, and cultural tradi-

tions-rationalist-positivist, mythopoetic, Afrocentric, Marxist, and

so on (see, e.g., Trouillot 2002)-rather than to settle for any one of

them, I consider it to be methodologically more appropriate to move

back and forth between the epistemological registers implied in these

discourses. The connection between ethos and ethics throughout this essay is

not arbitrary, but reflects the need to consider Caribbean people as

moral persons.1 This is to say that their actions and parameters of

thought should be regarded as a collective attempt of structuring and

making sense of the world in a culturally specific way that facilitates

the 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 individual

and not an abstract "ghost" acting in a cultural vacuum (Hinman

n.d., 1). I intend to advance themes that, for a long time, have lin-

gered in the discussions about Caribbean culture and identity but

in the past have been centered on demonstrating the commonalities

between African or Asian cultures and those of the Caribbean. While

I firmly 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 have

reached a point where it is appropriate to expand the parameters of

these debates in order to arrive at a definition of the Caribbean per- sona sui generis, i.e., without constructing parallel universes. This

attempt is neither denying the persistent validity of cultural heritage nor 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, in

their process of mutual attraction, rejection, and mixing, have created

a unique intellectual space that has come to inform their habitual

ways of living and moral motivation.

ARIEL'S ETHOS i 35

When I speak of philosophical thought, I would therefore like to 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 Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James, and many others.3 As Paget Henry (2000, 2) pointed out recently, much of what can be regarded as philosophical statements in the Caribbean context are discursive

practices embedded in nonphilosophical discourses or texts. While, like all intellectual work, this is work in progress, I was especially encouraged by Henry's recent fascinating and important book Cal- iban's Reason and his and Wilson Harris's plea for a mythopoetic logic and the need for Caribbean writers to take greater account of this

logic, or as Henry calls them, "gateways" (2000, 106, 270). Although I do 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 contours of what I call "Caribbean existence." My exploration of the everyday wells of Caribbean thought, therefore, stands somewhat in contrast to

Henry's groundbreaking book, which focuses on the literary, "high" tradition of Caribbean thought. Thus, I do not regard everyday dis- courses merely as context, but rather as the most profound space of

enacting 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 important feature of Caribbean existence is the persistent presence of "differ- ence" and alterity, which give its discourse(s) an epistemological gravity that more often than not collapses them into each other (see, e.g., Benitez-Rojo 1996, 1-29; Henke 1997, 43). We will return to this

aspect later, but suffice it to mention here that the intense competition between different value systems in the region tends to simultane-

ously validate and devalue all of them. The nature of Caribbean philosophical thought actually appears to demand that we approach it as a complex of ideas challenging us persistently to pursue-to borrow Gayatri Spivak's words-a "critique of what one cannot not want" (Landry and MacLean 1996, 28). I will attempt to integrate this approach into the very language of thought about the elements of Caribbean moral existence, which may result in a play with words and, indeed, in seemingly irrational or poetic conclusions about its

36 I HOLGER HENKE

discursive space and limits. Using pun, innuendo, double-edged irony, and so on, are autochthonous modes of Caribbean everyday discourse. By appropriating them as tools in the more highfalutin rationalist and positivistic lingua of academic discourse, we hope to contribute to a validation of Caribbean thought that will demonstrate one possible way to more appropriately represent the people of the

region.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 Cesaire in his 1944

essay "Poetry and Cognition" called poetic knowledge-that is, knowl-

edge "in which man spatters the object with all of his mobilized riches" (quoted in Kelley 2000, 18).6

Thus, Ariel is flying again. As a delimiting force acting in a dense

web of polycultural meanings and moral and intellectual codes, she

or he has proven to represent the elements of fluidity and centrifu-

gality in Caribbean existence. Ariel as a metatheoretical symbol for an

ongoing discourse about the nature of Caribbean existence shall in

the second half of this essay be the central "figure" through which I at-

tempt to read some of the characterizations developed in the first half.

THE CARIBBEAN AS AN ANTIESSENTIALIST SPACE

When conceptualizing and writing about the Caribbean, one has to

be 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 difficult to arrive at unanimous and universally valid conclusions and concepts about it. In this sense, the region is

indeed a land in which the truth is wandering off the usual trodden

paths and, to use Krishnamurti's statement in the epigraph, limitless.

However, not only the great diversity of cultures and their modes of

thinking and discourse contribute to this opaqueness, but also the

fact that, in some of the original African, Indian, and Chinese cultures

themselves, binary oppositions and logocentric discourse, Western

notions of progress, the juxtaposition of wo/man and nature, and the

terminality of history-to mention only a few of the hegemonic modes

of thought in the region during the past four or five centuries-do

not constitute the traditional epistemology.

ARIEL'S ETHOS | 37

The nature of Caribbean thought is therefore profoundly anti- essentialist. This is to say that it tends to hold the view that nature and objects are not necessarily what they seem, that they do not

readily reveal their true nature (essence), or at least that they may represent different essences at different times. It tends to flatly re-

ject monadic constructions that view reality as indivisible. Caribbean

everyday 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 shifts and digressions are at the center of Caribbean existence, it is opposed to the notion of an essence itself. Let us consider, for example, Jamaican music icon Lee "Scratch" Perry's simultaneously idiosyn- cratic and clarifying-and, in my mind, quintessentially Caribbean-

self-description:

I'm an artist, a musician, a magician, a writer, a singer; I'm everything. My name is Lee from the African jungle, originally from West Africa. I'm a man from somewhere else, but my origin is from Africa, straight to Jamaica through reincarnation; reborn in Jamaica. ... I have been

programmed; many people who born again must come back to learn a lesson.... [H]ave you heard of ET? I am ET, savvy? Savvy? (quoted in Katz 2000, 1)

This cunning voice from a polyvalent, heteroclitic, hyperhybrid, Cha-

gallian Caribbean cosmological and epistemological heterotopia7 gives a good impression of the rhizomatic-as Glissant might put it-discourse strategies in these parts.

Any conceptualization of Caribbean thought will consequently have to take note of this antiessentialism and make it its fundamental basis. However, the use of terms and concepts of ethics, essentialism versus antiessentialism, and so on, may in itself very well already be a (Western) imposition on this space that inherently rejects bipolar modes of thought, while enabling polyvalent patterns of thought and

enacting 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 many cases still today, the colonial values (i.e., the colonists' aesthetics, their language, their beauty ideals, and so on) have constituted the

privileged discourse and defined who is "in" and who is "outside"

38 1 HOLGER HENKE

society. This situation has, for example, created a competing system of 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 primarily African values has come to define both social reputation and, to a lesser extent, respectability. As Rohlehr has put it in another con- text, Caribbean self-perception "hovers between the alternatives of adamic renewal or return, and existentialist sense of void" (1980, 14). Within this mix, we also find social and philosophical traditions from India and China.

BRIDGING THE CHASM: THE ROLE OF HUMOR IN CARIBBEAN DISCOURSE

Whatever the particular mixture of these elements may be, it is

apparent that the earlier described hybridity had one general conse-

quence, which is common to most of Caribbean everyday life. I am

referring to the important function of humor (by innuendo) as a mechanism 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 simply an empty and vain vessel of communication. Quite to the contrary, more often than not it embodies important lessons and truths. As a source of folk wisdom and tradition it does not establish a set of

privileged and hegemonic moral rules, which may be enforced on

any possible dissenters, but it strives-and usually succeeds-to demonstrate 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 that allows all to recognize their humanity and-at the same time-to see themselves from the outside. It makes the "normal" self strange to

itself, or rather it reminds the Caribbean self of its multiple identity sources and thus fundamentally engenders discursive empathy. In the process of laughing, the listener engages in a sort of secular tran- scendental experience from which he or she emerges with a higher

ARIEL'S ETHOS | 39

consciousness of him- or herself. It is the Caribbean subaltern's way to speak and to speak back to the colonialists (and all that followed

them). Humor is the Caribbean's unobtrusive strategy to establish a

synthesis where only the opposition of thesis and antithesis seems to be imaginable.11

Unlike for other humorous situations, humor in Caribbean

everyday discourse is a constant possibility. In his theory of humor Veatch (1998) explained that for humor to "function" it requires three

components: (1) an element of normality (N), (2) the perception of a

subjective moral violation in a situation (V), and (3) both V and N need 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 perceived as normality in order to collapse or dissolve both elements in a humorous way. By way of the constant presence, or at least potential presence, of clashing value systems, the transcendent moment offers itself to the witty comment at any given time. While the outside observer often attributes this lifestyle to the easygoing nature of Caribbean people, for the Caribbean psyche the humorous transgres- sion means a devaluation of the moral absolutes contained in each value system. In other words, what appears as carefree attitude in

reality carries much more fundamental connotations with it. It is a relief from a persistently psychological tension that pervades many Caribbean 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 order" vested in N. To the extent that this moral order is challenged, ques- tioned, or humorously violated by V, N's validity is slightly reduced or at least temporarily compromised. By invoking and humorously straddling this ambivalence, however, humor becomes a bridge over which the individual can traverse the chasm that opens between com-

peting moral systems. Thus, while Fanon (1986, 183) speaks about a "manicheism delirium," and Cesaire laments about societies "in whom fear has been cunningly instilled, who have been taught to have an inferiority complex, to tremble, kneel, despair, and behave like flunkeys" (2000, 43), we often see the Antillean laughingly shrug

40 | HOLGER HENKE

off the depth of the ontological abyss-the Valley of Non-being-she or 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., in Jamaica, Trinidad, or Guyana), while in more homogeneous Carib- bean societies the prevailing traditional African concepts (e.g., in Haiti) and creolizations thereof tend to reduce the moral tensions that exist between such concepts by virtue of their ability to be sources of order and communal peace. These concepts are both of and for the

community, which clearly points to their African origins (see Mbiti 1999, 200). Cultural production (including everyday discourse) in these societies often tends to de-emphasize the humorous element observed in the more diverse Caribbean societies, and focuses more on spiritual, religious, and quasi-religious cultural grammar and

iconography. One field in which the insurgent and transcendental power of

humor in the Caribbean has been mastered is the art of the kaiso.

Among many appropriate lyrics, we may take a closer look at the Trinidadian calypsonian Mighty Sparrow's song "Obeah Wedding," which humorously contrasts two fundamentally different approaches at securing love.12 While the person, a woman named Melda, is trying to attain Sparrow's love through the use of an Obeah spell (by virtue of Obeah's Akan and Igbo roots, representing the African value

system), Sparrow points out to her that she does not fulfill 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 to bewitch him, and to her lack of personal hygiene. His advice to her is that if she will brush her teeth better and bathe herself regularly with soap, she will likely find a hubby without having to resort to love spells and incense-burning rituals.

Interestingly, while Sparrow appears prima facie to reject the "African approach" (i.e., the Obeah witchcraft), he does not carry this criticism all the way through the song. Thus, his suggestions for a more successful approach might lead a cunumunu to become Melda's lover.13 The possible West African root of the term is clearly

ARIEL'S ETHOS | 41

an expression pointing to the creole nature of the society where the obeah wedding is supposed to occur. By retaining this sympathy for

Africanness, 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 this

particular courtship situation. Both end up putting each other in per- spective and coexist rather than compete with each other. Humor transcends the moral divisions of everyday discourse.

Ambivalences in Caribbean discourse are embedded in language itself, a language that in many instances has been pieced together on the basis of some European language, but which carries significant remnants of African, Indian, and other languages. The most preva- lent forms of humor in Caribbean discourse therefore are pun and innuendo, which are both based on linguistic ambiguity. Here humor is 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 fact that time is conceived differently in the region than in the industrial- ized West. The well-known "soon come" and "any time is Trinidad time" have actually become distinct selling features for travel agen- cies offering Caribbean vacations to bag-eyed Americans, Britons, or Germans. As will be demonstrated later ("soon come"), this seem-

ingly trivial observation also has moral implications. Again, it is

important 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 economic circumstances of an individual or a community. Thus, the perception of 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 to be 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

42 I HOLGER HENKE

thought, with an indefinite past, present, and infinite future is dif-

ferently constructed in traditional African society. The traditional African concept of time is mainly event-driven, concrete, and-un- like modern European concepts-not measured in abstract intervals:

Time has to be experienced to make sense or to become real. A person experiences time partly in his own individual life, and partly through society which goes back many generations before his own birth. Since what is the future has not been experienced, it does not make sense; it

cannot, therefore, constitute part of time, and people do not know how to think about it-unless, of course, it is something which falls within the rhythm of natural phenomena. (Mbiti 1999, 17)14

Without question, this concept of time is inextricably bound with a

cosmology and religion that values community and, thus, morality as a social and public affair. Different concepts of time have clashed

in the region. As Birth (1999) has explained in great detail, the previ-

ously described prevalent African conception of time was forcibly

replaced by European clock time. The latter stood for the temporal

rigidities and, by implication, the racist hierarchies and ethnocentric

value systems introduced and perpetuated by the colonial plantation

system. 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 ownership of a largely atomized expatriate group over other people's labor,

indeed, their bodies and therefore their existence. Of course, with the

persistence of capitalist working arrangements in largely urban envi-

ronments, technological time continues to be the defining concept for the scheduling of many, if not most, significant daily activities

throughout the Caribbean. In contrast, as Glissant (1989, 93) points out, the Caribbean per-

son intuitively and defiantly rejects any set notion of time, particu-

larly clock time. The ideal becomes a "non-defined understanding" of time, a concept of time that does not measure in fixed divisions, but rather according to what in a given context appears to be the nat-

ural dynamic or sequence of events. This natural, more fluid under-

standing of time is, for example, embodied in Trinidadian "liming."

Liming, a contradiction to clock time, is by definition a social affair.

An individual alone cannot lime (Eriksen 1990). It requires a group of

ARIEL'S ETHOS | 43

like-minded companions-family, perhaps, or friends-who "hang out" together and follow the flow of the group's collective will and

mood(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 against the ascetic rationalism inherent in capitalism and Protestantism.15 In liming the primacy of community, understood as a natural and

largely voluntary system of rules, is resurrected or asserted through the imposition-or rather lack-of (a sequence of) group action(s).16 It is rather a democratic enterprise than a hierarchically structured

process. Without doubt, liming as an activity ought to be considered as a Caribbean form of resistance to an ethic for which "wasting time is the first and in principle most serious of all sins":

Loss of time because of conviviality, luxury, even because of more than the necessary and healthy amount of sleep-6 to 8 hours at most-is

morally 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 negotiation between the poles defining the two extremes. Thus, as Birth (1999, 134-42) points out correctly, glosses such as "jus' now," "soon come," or "any time is Trinidad time" are widely used placeholders that

simultaneously demarcate the conflict of two or more different ethics (here, temporal concepts) and help to defuse or negotiate this con- flict. While they never really resolve the fundamental existing antag- onism, they serve as markers that establish a common ground that most parties to the conflict intuitively recognize as an inalienable

part of their (national) identity. Thus, these markers implicitly say, "This is who we are as Trinidadians, Jamaicans, Caribbeans. They-the conflict and the glosses-are what make us us." Thus, the Carib- bean's unique moral condition oscillates between essentialist posi- tions. In other words, the Caribbean persona tends to reject either/or dichotomies and prefers to embrace explicitly contextualized and

synergetic concepts of moral valorization as part of its identity. This

impulse is strongest among the ethnic majority in the region, the peo- ple of African origin, and it stands in constant contrast to the official Eurocentric (political) system.

44 1 HOLGER HENKE

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 the Western tendency to moral abstraction, such as described, for exam- ple, in Kant's 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). One

might even go so far as to suggest that liming is a distant echo of aris- tocratic European concepts of leisurely individualism. However, in Afro-Caribbean tradition there is a greater emphasis on limiting indi- vidualism by the demands of the community (see, e.g., Gbadegesin 1998, 293). These traditions have survived in the Caribbean. Thus, as Mintz and Trouillot point out, in Haitian vodou "the difference between good and evil is realized in practice rather than through some essential manicheism as in Christianity" (1998, 131). While the

imposed moral value system puts a premium on individualism and

egocentrism, the morality of Caribbean society is characterized by a fundamental anthropocentrism.17 In this tradition, a person who sim-

ply watches while children fight or when conflict occurs between adults 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 while moral concepts such as justice are certainly a part of it, they are some- what broken through the social divisions implemented through the caste system. Although the caste system and its pertinent notions of

purity 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 caste

system has become seriously undermined in the creolized/creolizing societies of the Caribbean, but given the original epistemology and

cosmology of African and Hindu philosophy, it has to be noted that both 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

ARIEL'S ETHOS 1 45

individualism, East Indian ethics-while equally opposed to the abuses and indignities of their indentureship-were at some level able to accommodate the rigidities and rituals of a hierarchical social order.

In much of Caribbean and Latin American writing, the conflict between European and creolized Afro-Asian moralities has been sym- bolically expressed by the figures of Prospero and Caliban in Shake-

speare's play The Tempest and an entire body of both academic and creative literature based on or inspired by it. I would like to cast my following interpretation of the Caribbean moral landscape in this tradition. However, it is my intention to rehabilitate the figure of Ariel, who can be seen to negotiate between the usually more promi- nently considered Caliban and Prospero.

ARIEL'S RETURN

Hegemonic discourse cannot simply confine itself to establishing a

taxonomy of civilization, i.e., defining the agents of civilization and the subjects of subjugation. The social dynamics of oppressive rule demand a more continuous production of stereotypical "civility" and "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 its

periphery.21 However, there is also a case to be made for Ariel, the elusive, ghostlike, creative, spirit-force, who-albeit being his mas- ter's instrument-nevertheless moves the unfolding plot of power, subordination, and revelation by the way of his otherworldly and

intangible, invisible hand. As I will argue, Ariel appears to personify the force of ideas that only slowly and incrementally move the course of history, but, once recognized for what they are, become a resource that cannot be resisted even by armies.

We recall that Shakespeare's Ariel had left the stage to live "under 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 after all others have left the stage; time may have passed, but as always, an audience is there:

46 | HOLGER HENKE

ARIEL enters stage from the left, still. Looking around in wonderment, he doesn't seem to find himself where he wanted to be. He leaves the stage to mingle with the audience. Bob Marley's "Rastaman Chant" is playing from imaginative loudspeakers between the reader's ears. While walking offstage, Ariel clears his throat, then begins to speak: Anyone here named Pablo? Pablo Picasso? (No

reply from the audience.) Nobody? (Thinking) Well, anybody here who can

explain the origin of Cubism? (Pauses) Oh, perhaps it is too early to ask. You're just enjoying 1611, 1838, 1933, 1989, or thereabout! (Loud, impa- tient) Well, what are you staring at me for, then? Go home, people, the show is over. Go back to Auschwitz, Bhopal, Chernobyl, Seveso, Soweto,

Gulag, Nagasaki, wherever you come from. (He disappears to the right, now humming Marley's "Redemption Song.")

Is it possible that Ariel, or even Caliban of Shakespeare's The Tempest, could have addressed the audience and in such an irreverent way?

Hardly. And yet, it is certainly imaginable that a new monologue could be written in a similar way. But new questions need to be

asked: Who is the audience addressed in this manner? Why is Ariel

leaving them? What is the nature of the show that was being played before this imaginary monologue? Such questions point to the fact

that parameters in the dialogue between hegemon and subaltern

have shifted and are subject to continuous paradigmatic shifts or-in

Sylvia Wynter's terminology-epistemic change. Thus, as for exam-

ple Stuart Hall has pointed out in his essay "New Ethnicities," there

can be "no simple 'return' or 'recovery' of the ancestral past which is

not re-experienced through the categories of the present" (2001, 448).

Or, as Scott argues more abstractly, Ariel's new monologue could be

understood as an invitation "to take up the more difficult task of

thinking 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 of

them, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, the cornucopian wordsmith from

Barbados, has attempted to bring the ghost into the picture. In his

article "Caliban, Ariel, and Unprospero in the Conflict of Creoliza-

tion: A Study of the Slave Revolt in Jamaica in 1831-32," Brathwaite

interprets the creolization process by utilizing Shakespeare's protag- onists as archetypical actors in the colonial drama. Although he is

aware of it, it would appear that his Ariel does not unfold the full

ambivalence Shakespeare had applied to his persona. In Brathwaite's

ARIEL'S ETHOS | 47

interpretation, Ariel, "usually an educated slave or freedman open to 'white' creolization and technology" (1977, 48), mainly acts as a

go-between, an intermediary, a Hermes, delivering signals and orders from the colonial Fiihrerbunker to the front lines of colonial sugar plantations in the Caribbean.22

In contrast to Brathwaite, I suggest that Ariel cannot be applied as an archetype that denotes a particular personality on the colonial

stage. Rather, Ariel has to be "read" for what he really is, an ethereal force 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 as a metaphor for a set of practices in Caribbean everyday life. Who is Shakespeare's Ariel really? Isn't she or he a creature that has

promised 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 thou hast promis'd, / Which is not yet perform'd me" (1.2.242-44). There is nothing ambiguous about this demand. But Ariel knows realpoli- tik. Prospero is in possession of superior magic: "If thou murmur'st, I will rend an oak, / And peg thee in his knotty entrails, till / Thou hast howl'd away twelve winters" (1.2.294-96). The result follows a clear cost-benefit analysis:

ARIEL: Pardon, master: I will be correspondent to command, And do my spiriting gently. PROSPERO: Do so; and after two days I will discharge thee. ARIEL: That's my noble master! What shall I do? say what; what shall I do? (1.2.297-300)

Ariel may be an ethereal force, but he is no dreamer. He is well aware of 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 Brathwaite's Ariel, the Ariel envisioned in this essay

comes closer to Rodo's emphatic description written in 1900:

He is generous enthusiasm, elevated and unselfish motivation in all actions, spirituality in culture, vivacity and grace in intelligence. Ariel is

48 | HOLGER HENKE

the ideal toward which human selection ascends, the force that wields life's eternal chisel, effacing from aspiring mankind the clinging ves-

tiges of Caliban, the play's symbol of brutal sensuality. (1988, 31)

Thus, Rodo's Ariel is more an invisible hand or an (elusive?) goal to

be aspired to. While we acknowledge the positive spin given to Ariel

in Rodo's essay, we also need to be mindful of the limits that the

author imposed on this figure, which have been criticized by others

such as Carlos Fuentes (in the foreword to the 1988 edition) and

Roberto Fernandez Retamar (1988). His endorsement of European- in particular French-culture and complete neglect of American

indigenous cultural contributions have to be noted as unfortunate

shortcomings, even if we-as Fuentes does-attempt to understand

it in the context of the essay's historical origins.

Similarly (and perhaps yet closer to the central argument pur- sued here), as J. Michael Dash points out, a more positive reading of Shakespeare's Ariel has also been suggested by Cesaire. "In the

voice of [Cesaire's] Ariel, the language of the land finds expression"

(1986, 57). In Dash's view, Cesaire's Ariel is directed toward the tran-

scendence of the revolt against Prospero:

His discourse is rooted in the belief that the imagination at its most

intensive strives beyond moral, political, and sexual divisions for an

androgynous wholeness. (56)

In Cesaire/Dash's interpretation, Ariel becomes a voice of (nonteleo-

logical) nature, of the landscape itself, which thus seems to become

an additional protagonist of the discourse. Ariel, then, is the voice of

a proto-ecological discourse.24 Yet, by virtue of his quasi-supernatu- ralistic appearance, Ariel seems to point to a higher order. The notion

of ethereal force implies certain powers-powers that cannot be seen,

operating subtly yet with determination, transmitting waves through the air that may on different occasions either gently direct or an-

nounce dread with a thunderous voice. Ariel, imprisoned by Sycorax "into a cloven pine; within which rift, / Imprison'd thou didst pain-

fully remain," without doubt is a master of music in Shakespeare's

play (1.2.277-79). Does it take too much imagination to see him akin

to a skin stretched over a drum? Isn't his ghostly song really the trans-

posed voice of Africa, the voice of the African-Caribbean? Isn't there

ARIEL'S ETHOS | 49

dreadful riddim in his song?: "Full fadom five thy father lies; / Of his

bones are coral made; / Those are pearls that were his eyes" (1.2.399- 400). There is even clearer evidence that Ariel has Maroon character:

... Then I beat my tabor; At which, like unback'd colts, they prick'd their ears, Advanc'd their eyelids, lifted up their noses, As they smelt music: so I charm'd their ears, That, calf-like, they my lowing follow'd ... (4.1.175-79)

If Ariel is not dubbing to a dub plate, his pied piper stage presence still conjures up the cosmology of African peoples. He is clearly not of the same flesh and blood as Prospero, Caliban, or Trinculo. Together with Prospero he both invokes and revokes a different time experi- ence: "My charms I'll break, their senses I'll restore, / And they shall be themselves" (5.1.31-32; see also 3.3). As indicated above, Ariel's

ghostly appearance also carries a morality of its own:

You are three men of sin, whom Destiny,

Hath caus'd to belch up you; and on this island, Where man doth not inhabit,-you 'mongst men

Being most unfit to live. I have made you mad. (3.3.53-58)

This morality is not only contained in Shakespeare's writing, but also innate in the invocation of African cosmology as it appears through the Ariel figure. 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 of human existence and the Supreme Being. There is communication, indeed interaction, and the well-being of humans depends on their

ability to please spiritual forces. As one prominent African theologian and philosopher has put it:

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

This relationship not only seems to describe the Ariel-Prospero

50 | HOLGER HENKE

relationship, but also connotes a moral dimension that is significantly different from the Christian tradition where no intermediary forces

allow the active manipulation of social relationships or commu- nal well-being. Where Europeans encountered Ariel's African spirit world 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 conventional

way, i.e., to help interpret and reinterpret the Prospero-Ariel

dynamic, the colonial encounter, and power relationships between

Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. But more is possible-and

required-in order for us to make the fullest use of the Bard's

ambiguous dialogues (see also Forbes 2001, 56). I shall therefore turn

around the mirror to see who indeed is the most beautiful around. It

is Ariel's time to laugh and lead the conversation.

ARIEL: Now, you're still here, bewitcher? Has'd somehow missed thy last boat home? Backra no longer, much smaller thy frame look'd now.

The golden chain around your paunch is gone, can't stop my time no

more. 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 speak'd of mistrust, dis-

content even. Thou didst not doubt my commitment ever, to you, the

fair 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 of

your European companions, jumping on his toes' tips, quite obviously

contrary to the drum 'n' bass's riddim? Quite a sight, I confess

to you. And thou should'st tell the fool that, for the most part, he and

his 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 clumsy one, no Sly Dunbar, Max Roach, or Elvin Jones yet from your seed

sprang forth.

Thus, or similar, the Bard might have felt compelled to write, had he

been born in the West Indies-and black.

ARIEL'S ETHOS | 51

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

Therefore, comrade, you will hold as enemies-loftily, lucidly, consis- tently-not only sadistic governors and greedy bankers, not only pre- fects who torture and colonists who flog, not only corrupt, check-licking politicians and subservient judges, but likewise and for the same rea- son, venomous journalists, goitrous academics, wreathed in dollars and stupidity, ethnographers who go in for metaphysics, presumptuous Bel- gian theologians, chattering intellectuals born stinking out of the thigh of Nietzsche, the patemalists, 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 in general, all those who, performing their functions in the sordid division of labor for the defense of Western bourgeois society, try in diverse ways and by infamous diversions to split up the forces of Progress-even if it means denying the very possibility of Progress-all of them tools of capitalism, 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, 54-55)

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- pero's language can be decentered" (2000, 3). And yet, writing back to Shakespeare, or reading Ariel backward, remains in some ways too much within the given confines of European discourse. The rhetorical tropes and figures basically remain the same, if mirrored in a some- what renegade style.25 Ariel remains mired in an Enlightenment argument, which prima facie would appear to fit him well. However, his adeptness to a polyrhythmic ontology is merely a gesture since it stays tied to the logic and narrative flow of the colonizer. Although this allows for considerable leverage, it also tries to fight the battle on a turf that has already been occupied, defined, and therefore tainted. Enlightenment morality was class- and race-based, i.e., dependent on the existence/creation of an Other, and hence is unfit for application to Caribbean contexts or for the purpose of comprehensive liberation. However, let us not part with Ariel yet, for-as Henry has argued

52 I HOLGER HENKE

incisively-our engagement with the poeticist tradition in Caribbean

thought is a necessary corrective to the predominance of the histori-

cist school within it (2000, 257-60). Ariel now has to remove him- self out of the bipolarity that has emerged, stand aside, and read the voices 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 to

read the text of The Tempest or some of the characters sideways. But

what can that possibly mean, and how can we read sideways? Obvi-

ously, "reading backward" implied a certain critique of the original text. However, by doing so, the backward-read text runs the risk of

becoming a new orthodoxy. "Reading sideways" then must presum-

ably provide us with an interpretation that does not easily run the

risk of transforming itself into such a fixed 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 on

the existing text and countertext. Thus, it has to be a sort of guiding

light without actually being a beacon.

In attempting to outline the contours of such a discourse, I hope that 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 Scott's much

larger project of refusing "history its subjectivity, its constancy, its

eternity; to think it otherwise than as the past's hold over the present, to interrupt its seemingly irrepressible succession, causality, its sov-

ereign claim to determinacy" (1999, 105). For our effort of mapping the moral economy of Caribbean existence, this refusal would then

translate into a text that equally questions hegemonic and counter-

hegemonic value-system discourses in the region. It would have

to achieve this by steering clear of both universalism and cultural rel-

ativism. The question is: Can it be done and has it been done in

the region? The second part of this question is easy to answer. There can be

no doubt that many aspects of the ongoing creolization experience(s)

ARIEL'S ETHOS | 53

in the region show how the peoples of this region have both used and refused elements of both their "autochthonous" value coordinates and those imposed by the colonial project. If, as I believe it has, the

imposed colonial moral economy-perpetuated in numerous differ-

ing ways in the postcolonial Caribbean-was a conscious attempt to confuse and corrupt the moral stage on which the colonial and

postcolonial dramas were acted out, a reconfigured moral economy cannot be gained by choosing between African, Anglo-European, and-to a lesser extent-Indo-Asian values. Instead, the way forward

appears to be in attempts to "normalize" a deeply creolized economy of emotions and values.26

In many instances the popular imagination in the region has moved in this direction, especially in the realms of magico-religious practices, for example, in Haitian vodou. Beauvoir-Dominique (1998), among others, describes the early rise of Freemason societies and the

continuing widespread use of wizard spell books (grimoires) in Haiti. These "underground realms of being," as she calls it, are to my mind the most obvious attempts to create "order," a new order, out of

reconfigured elements inherited from ancestral and acquired occult

spaces of "we" (see also Hurbon 1995, 146-49):

Imagine fumes of sulfur, lashing of whips, echoing forth to present-day Petwo 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 them

throughout their war, "under the obedience of Petwo" (sou lobedyans Petwo). (Beauvoir-Dominique 1998,162)

And yes, there are definite attempts to unlearn the bi- and tripolari- ties imposed on the people of the region. Some of these attempts go beyond the "simple" use of language, text, and spoken word, and make their statements in the realm of music and the creative arts (see also Forbes 2001, 66). Others-important for a "social science"

analysis-stay dedicated to the use of words and language, but at the same time attempt to transcend the inherited materials and re-create an original language and discourse about Caribbean ethics/ethos.

Foremost, in my mind, is the poetic work of Brathwaite who has

developed, 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

54 | HOLGER HENKE

here is "transform." Brathwaite's writing style, indeed, has surpassed

many conventions, and with the materials offered by history and con-

temporary affairs, his entire oeuvre is a re-creation of an authentic

Caribbean voice, a re-indigenization and reoccupation of the moral

and ethical space held by Caribbean indigenous and African peo-

ples before the arrival of the colonialists. Thus, when he describes

the view from the location where he lived in Jamaica, overlooking

Kingston:

Kin

gston Harbour the sea fr- om Old Harbour, Spanish Town, Caymanas, right rou nd to Bull Bay, Pharoah S anders' sun-ship and vail

ey-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 lookin south tho feelin 'north' (Brathwaite 1999,124)

he does not simply depict a geographic, but attempts to characterize

also the torn and fragmented historicity of the intellectual space inhabited by modem Caribbean woman/man.

In fact, however, the authentic, organic voice of the Caribbean is

evident in many different locations and efforts of artistic (re)creation.

Can this be done on a larger, and more sustained scale, one that

even infects the (academic) discourse about Caribbean existence? The

answer to this question will depend-among other things-on the

historical 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 reorder

them for the exploration of a mindscape that has dramatically altered

from the time when he fantasized about the New World. The raw

material is there. The seeds of a fundamental discursive displacement in the Caribbean exist at the margins of (official) society and will

always represent a potential option indicating that the official moral

economy in the region could and ought to be stacked in ways that

ARIEL'S ETHOS | 55

decenter legitimacy claims of universal, homogenous, privileged, monadic, and positivist markers and signifiers. The result, however, will not be another fixed point, a definite and defining narrative, but, as Benitez-Rojo reminds us aptly, "the goal . . . lies always at an

unreachable point, at the edge of the infinite, there, in a space that shifts continually from the possible to the impossible" (1996, 182):

ARIEL: So, could it be done? PROSPERO: Why you always asking me? Haven't I given all the wrong answers yet? Go find 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. That's fine.

I don't have all your answers, why are you even asking me? (Sucking his teeth; then, as if suddenly reminding himself of something) I do share your ... (Pauses) No, let's not start again. TRINCULO: Are you ready to leave already? You can't quit now. (Both just stare at him.) I mean, it's just not the time yet. ARIEL: Why dat? Is yo mumma tell yuh? Or de nex' one. What 'im name

again? Aloysius Gossamer Longshoreman ... som't'ing som't'ing ...? TRINCULO: Just wait. It's not the right time yet. PROSPERO: I'm not going anywhere anyhow. I'm down with you. TRINCULO: Well, as I say, this is not the right time yet. This is the age where you go dot-com. But, you don't 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 to you doesn't even remember what time is. So, what are you telling me about long time? Time longer than rope. I say you have to wait. You wait, it'll be here soon enough. PROSPERO, protests: Hey, hey, hey; I remember why we're here. I brought you here after all. (Falling back into thoughtfulness/forgetfulness) But wait, isn't it all over now? What are we waiting for? TRINCULO, with attitude: You didn't hear what I said, old man. I say you have to stick around. You have to wait for 2Dog. He'll question your answers, your doubts, and your questions. ARIEL, imitating a British accent: Well, then, why don't we all enjoy a cup of tea in the meantime? I have here the finest of the finest. A rather exquisite mixture imported from Ceylon-pardon me, Sri Lanka.

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

56 i HOLGER HENKE

existence. This shift in perspective seems to be implied, for example, in George Lamming's work, particularly when he raises the issue of

a sovereignty beyond the narrowly conceived political sovereignty of 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 and

because of the movement nature of Caribbean existence, our mytho-

poetic perspective of the Caribbean moral economy can and indeed

has to turn back to a more positivist evaluation. Thus, using Lam-

ming's shift as a starting point, the question may be posed where the

Caribbean stands in regard to the current transformation of the

humanist ethos.

Although ethic and moral philosophy have for some time lagged behind the new developments in technology, we are currently in

a transition that at its end may-whether we like it or not-even

make the old humanistic moral economy obsolete.27 Since the dawn

of human consciousness and certainly since the European Enlighten-

ment, individuals could at best hope to be a sub-ject (i.e., attainment

of independence under a preexisting and encompassing conceptual

frame, such as God, human rights, and so on). Due to advances with

the Human Genome Project, advances in cloning, and stem cell tech-

nology, new horizons are looming under which humanity has the

possibility 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 more

nuanced, philosophically rigorous, and intense in Europe than in the

more pragmatic U.S. public.28 In the Caribbean, however, I do not

yet see the emerging contours of the Caribbean perspective on these

issues. In the past we have witnessed concern about young black

girls in the region using skin bleaching substances, but what if U.S.

companies were to offer genetic manipulation that would promise

to achieve Michael Jackson-like or Jennifer Lopez-type features

without the use of a scalpel? What would be the social implications for the region if there were doctors offering phenotypically black par-

ents an affordable option to have their child become a "browning"-

flowing hair, straight elongated nose, thin lips, and all?

Perhaps regional intellectuals and decision makers implicitly

ARIEL'S ETHOS | 57

believe that these issues can be avoided, since they may be able to code-switch through the new options that are evolving. And perhaps that might even work. But, as mentioned before, something else is also eroding; the (imperfect) fundamentals of humanism such as human dignity, inviolability of life, the integrity of the person, and so on are quite possibly fighting a lost battle against the overwhelming "tyranny of the possible" implicit in these new life-changing tech-

nologies. Like it or not, these humanist fundamentals have affected the Caribbean-a creation of European, African, and Asian cultures -to a great extent. If we are indeed on the verge of becoming our own project, how will the Caribbean elect to shape itself and its future? How will its moral economy evolve if humanism's lure is

fading? If hitherto the Caribbean was a hybrid of Europe and Africa (and, to a lesser extent, parts of Asia and the Near East), what will be the long-term effects of the possible disappearance of the argu- ably most substantial influence, the European humanistic system? In whose image will the Caribbean create itself following these epochal changes? Will we witness a showdown between-to analogize with Aristotle's classification of knowledge-an Afro-/Indo-centric mythic poiesis (as the basis of a new thrust of Caribbean nationalisms) and a U.S.-inspired quick-buck praxis (i.e., globalization), while the Euro- humanistic rationalist theoria falls by the wayside? Ariel will have to be on the move again and can no longer afford the same degree of

"philosophical 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, Trevor Purcell, 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 outside of the parameters of morality and without an involvement in the potentially treacherous 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 Latin conscire (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 term "economy" was introduced in this context.

58 | HOLGER HENKE

2. Important arguments along the same line have been suggested by important Caribbean writers such as Wilson Harris, Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, Derek Walcott, and others. In the following I will refer to some of this work.

3. By using the term "subaltern" I do not wish to invoke Spivak's misin- terpreted essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" from which, in any case, she has distanced herself (see, e.g., Landry and McLean 1996). Rather, it is used in the Gramscian sense that Meeks (2000, 22-24) seems to propose.

4. This statement may be regarded as problematic and requiring some

explanation. In my view, there does already exist a Caribbean cultural discourse that is largely embodied in the cultural practices, traditions, and everyday actions of Caribbean peoples. To my mind, Caribbean scholars have not yet sufficiently recognized and thematized these mostly performative and nonscriptural expres- sions of Caribbean thought. It is hoped this modest attempt at integrating them into scholarly work will achieve some of the still missing recognition.

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

6. And for a moment we will overlook Cesaire's gendered concept of the

rationalizing human being. 7. In his essay "Of Other Spaces," Foucault defines the term the following

way: "There are probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places- places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society-which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real 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 all

places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, 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 old

structure, borrowing them structurally, that is to say, without being able to isolate their elements and atoms, the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain

way falls prey to its own work" (quoted in Landry and MacLean 1996, 7). 9. Thus, while in the Christian tradition current Jamaican moral values

certainly are perceived as being ordained by God, traditional Ashanti beliefs hold that "God has no influence on people's moral values" (Mbiti 1999, 202). However, Ashanti was one of the main ethnic groups from which people were brought as slaves to Jamaica (Alleyne 1989, 44; Craton 1982, 125). The connection certainly needs a more systematic exploration, but the question arises whether Jamaica's current moral crisis does not also find an explanation in these competing percep- tions of God's role in the determination of human moral values.

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

ARIEL'S ETHOS | 59

that Caribbean thought is at different times and for different groups influenced by a variety of contending cosmologies, ontologies, and epistemologies. Any con- structive in-depth and prolonged communication between these systems is likely to encounter implicit or explicit definitional 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 the Caribbean context is the marginality suffered by nonconforming individualism and eccentricity or the more or less real escape of (post)colonial "madness." See, for example, Henke 1996, 69-71; and Price 1998, 157-217.

12. Despite several attempts to secure a copyright permission for the few lines 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 to read the lyrics of the song on-line, where it can be found reproduced at a variety of locations, e.g., at socanews.com/music/lyrics/melda(obeahwedding).shtml or at arts.yorku.ca/english/creet/ lyrics.html.

13. Cunumunu is a Trinidadian term for a stupid person. The word is also known in Jamaica (and possibly other Caribbean countries) and is therefore prob- ably of West African origin. In Sparrow's song, the term is pronounced with an "1" in place of the second "n" in cunumunu (koo-noo-mooloo).

14. Mbiti's claim that African society does not know "future" (1999, 16) has been proven wrong by a number of authors and subsequently intense debates have 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 of a free and hedonistic enjoyment of wealth, the subversive power of liming is eas-

ily discernible. Despite the impression given by Weber, however, we also have to 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 does

not get adequate coverage and is not sufficiently 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 a

stronger 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 less concrete 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.

60 | HOLGER HENKE

21. See, for instance, Cesaire's A Tempest (1999), Retamar's Caliban y otros

ensayos (1979), Toumson's Trois Calibans (1981), or the creative oeuvre of George Lamming, which centers on The Tempest.

22. It is important to note at this point that Brathwaite introduces what he

calls the "Aerial" persona. Aerial functions in his argument as a kind of prototype Ariel, an Ariel who aspires to, but cannot achieve, becoming his full self. Only in

exceptional cases and for exceptional individuals (e.g., Jamaica's national hero

Sam Sharpe) was the successful entrance "into the Euro-creolizing or ac/cultura- tive process" made possible (Brathwaite 1977, 59/60). Still, the relationship Ariel/Aerial is not applied consistently throughout Brathwaite's text. In his Con-

versations with Nathaniel Mackey, Brathwaite describes Ariel as "Prospero's spying

eyes, his communication apparat, police and television aerials" (1999, 188). Ariel

has a similarly (potentially) reactionary role in Retamar's (1988) interpretation. 23. This seems also to be the way Cesaire reads Ariel (see 1999, 20-23). 24. Edouard Glissant has consciously and brilliantly incorporated this as-

pect into his oeuvre. Consider, for example, Glissant's thoughts about the land:

"I am struck by the fate of flowers. The shapeless yielding to the shapely. As if the

land had rejected its 'essence' to concentrate everything in appearance. It can be

seen but not smelt. Also these thoughts on flowers are not a matter of lamenting a vanished idyll in the past. But it is true that the fragile and fragrant flower

demanded in the past daily care from the community that acted on its own. The

flower without fragrance endures today, is maintained in form only. Perhaps that

is the emblem of our wait? We dream of what we will cultivate in the future, and

we wonder vaguely what the new hybrid that is already being prepared for us

will look like, since in any case we will not rediscover them as they were, the

magnolias of former times" (1989,52). While in the context of the hybrid, ambigu- ous moral situation of the Caribbean the dream for the flower's fragrance becomes the dominant register of thought and action, the rampant materialism of

much of the rest of the world appears to rush in a pseudoteleological frenzy from

one invention to the next, from one record to the next, from growth to more

growth, with inner and external peace of woman/man with herself and between

woman/man and nature being as remote as ever before. While much of the

Caribbean is certainly infected by the same bug, it nevertheless seems to run

against its deep inner being. If Novalis's mythic Blue Flower was ever to be

found, it would grow somewhere in the rainforest or along the seashores of the

Caribbean 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 unambiguous

concepts. Space considerations prevent a problematization of these terms, and

I am using them here simply in order to point to the fundamentally hybrid, inter-

mediary, and multilayered nature of Caribbean social systems. For a more

comprehensive treatment, see Shepherd and Richards (2002), in particular the

excellent chapters by Nigel Bolland and Carolyn Allen.

ARIEL'S ETHOS 1 61

27. The operative word here is "may." Obviously the debate about whether what is technologically possible shall also be what is morally allowed is currently in full swing.

28. I am thinking here in particular about a highly controversial speech in 1998 by the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk (his "Elmau Lecture"), replies by Juiirgen Habermas, Robert Spaemann, and subsequent interventions by the Ger- man chancellor and Bundesprasident, among others (see also Jongen 2001). As far as I can see, the Sloterdijk lecture is not yet available in English, at least not on the Internet; however, one source that includes debate about his ideas and more recent 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 way with regard to the development of a Caribbean philosophy, some of which were alluded to in this text.

Works Cited

Abrahams, Roger D. "Public Drama and Common Values in Two Caribbean Islands." Transaction (July-August 1968): 62-71.

. The Man-of- Words in the West Indies: Performance and the Emergence of Creole Culture. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.

Alleyne, Mervyn. Roots of Jamaican Culture. London: Pluto Press, 1989. Beauvoir-Dominique, Rachel. "Underground Realms of Being: Vodoun Magic."

In Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, ed. Donald J. Cosentino, 153-77. Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1998.

Benitez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Per- spective. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996.

Beyaraza, Ernest. The African Concept of Time: A Comparative Study of Various Theo- ries. Kampala, Uganda: Makerere University Press, 2000.

Birth, Kevin. "Any Time Is Trinidad Time": Social Meanings and Temporal Conscious- ness. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999.

Bobb, June D. Beating a Restless Drum: The Poetics of Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1998.

Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. "Caliban, Ariel, and Unprospero in the Conflict of Creolization: A Study of the Slave Revolt in Jamaica in 1831-32." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 292 (1977): 45-69.

Brathwaite, Kamau. Conversations with Nathaniel Mackey. Staten Island, N.Y.: We Press and Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics, 1999.

Brown, Paul. "'This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine': The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism." In Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, 48-71. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Cesaire, Aime. A Tempest. New York: Ubu Repertory Theater Publications, 1999. . Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.

62 | HOLGER HENKE

Craton, Michael. Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1982.

Dash, J. Michael. "Ariel's Discourse: French Caribbean Writing after the Storm."

Journal of West Indian Literature 1, no. 1 (1986): 49-58. Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. "Liming in Trinidad." Folk 32 (1990): 23-43. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks, London: Pluto Press, 1986. Forbes, Curdella. "Shakespeare, Other Shakespeares, and West Indian Popular

Culture: A Reading of the Erotics of Errantry and Rebellion in Troilus and Cressida." small axe 9 (March 2001): 44-69.

Foucault, Michel. "Of Other Spaces." Diacritics 16, no. 1 (spring 1986): 22-27.

Gbadegesin, Segun. "Individuality, Community, and the Moral Order." In The

African Philosophy Reader, ed. P. H. Coetzee and A. P. J. Roux, 292-305. Lon- don: Routledge, 1998.

Glissant, Edouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989.

Gordon, Lewis R. Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Hall, Stuart. "New Ethnicities." In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Stud-

ies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, 441-49. London and New York:

Routledge, 2001. Henke, Holger. "Mapping the 'Inner Plantation': A Cultural Exploration of the

Origins of Caribbean Local Discourse." Social and Economic Studies 45, no. 4

(1996): 51-75. . "Towards an Ontology of Caribbean Existence." Social Epistemology 11,

no. 1 (January-March 1997): 39-71.

Henry, Paget. Caliban's Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy. New York

and London: Routledge, 2000.

Hinman, Lawrence M. "The Place of Race, Ethnicity, and Culture in Moral The-

ory." Unpublished paper, Values Institute, University of San Diego. http://

ethics.sandiego.edu/Applied/Race/index.html. Accessed November 2001.

Hurbon, Laennec. Voodoo: Search for the Spirit. New York: Abrams, 1995.

Jongen, Marc. "Der Mensch ist sein eigenes Experiment." Die Zeit, August 9,2001,31.

Katz, David. People Funny Boy. Edinburgh: Payback Press, 2000.

Kelley, Robin D. G. "A Poetics of Anticolonialism." Introduction to Discourse on

Colonialism, Aime Cesaire, 7-28. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.

Khan, Abrahim H. Identity, Personhood, and Religion in Caribbean Context. Working

Paper No. 96/97-98. Cambridge: Harvard University, David Rockefeller

Center for Latin American Studies, 1996.

Lamming, George. "The Sovereignty of the Imagination: An Interview with

George Lamming." small axe 12 (September 2002): 72-200.

Landry, Donna, and Gerald MacLean, eds. The Spivak Reader. New York and Lon-

don: Routledge, 1996.

Mbiti, John S. African Religions and Philosophy. Oxford: Heinemann, 1999.

ARIEL'S ETHOS | 63

Meeks, Brian. Narratives of Resistance: Jamaica, Trinidad, the Caribbean. Mona: Uni-

versity of the West Indies Press, 2000. Mintz, Sidney, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot. "The Social History of Haitian Vodou."

In Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, ed. Donald J. Cosentino, 123-47. Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1998.

Price, Richard. The Convict and the Colonel. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998. Retamar, Roberto Femaindez. Kaliban: Essays zur Kultur Lateinamerikas. Munich and

Zurich: Piper, 1988. Originally published as Caliban y otros ensayos: Nuestra America y el mundo (Havana: Editorial Arte y Literatura, 1979).

Rod6, Jose Enrique. Ariel. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988. Rohlehr, Gordon. "Articulating a Caribbean Aesthetic: The Revolution of Self-

Perception." Caribe (Caribbean Expressions Festival I) (1980): 7-15. Schwartz, Barton M. "Ritual Aspects of Class in Trinidad." Anthropological Quar-

terly 37 (1964): 1-15. Scott, David. Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality. Princeton, N.J.:

Princeton University Press, 1999.

Shepherd, Verene A., and Glen L. Richards, eds. Questioning Creole: Creolisation Discourses in Caribbean Culture. Kingston and Oxford: Ian Randle and James Currey, 2002.

Toumson, Roger. Trois Calibans: Essai. Havana: Casa de Las Americas, 1981. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. "The Otherwise Modern: Caribbean Lessons from the

Savage Slot." In Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies, ed. Bruce M. Knauft, 220-40. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.

Veatch, Thomas C. "A Theory of Humor." Humor: The International Journal of Humor Research, May 1998. http://www.tomveatch.com/else/humor/paper.

Weber, Max. Soziologie: Universalgeschichtliche Analysen. Politik. Stuttgart: Alfred Kroner, 1973.

Wilson, Peter. Crab Antics. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973.