Sounding off: performing ritual revolt in Olive Senior's "Meditation on Yellow".

(Critical essay)
In "Meditation on Yellow," the introductory poem of Gardening in the Tropics, Olive Senior demonstrates the significance of voice in the staging of Afro-Caribbean rituals of revolt. Throughout the entire collection, but in that poem in particular, not only does Senior focus on women who are wily, crafty, Anancy-esque in their rebellion against hegemonic discourse, but her own poetic voice is also just as "(de)ceitful." (1) Indeed, the tonal turbulence of Senior's poems exposes her reliance on the resources of Afro-Caribbean expressive culture--"kass-kass," "drop-word," "back-chat" and the general use of a "ceitful" tongue--to enunciate her bodymemory poetics of revolution. For Carolyn Cooper in Noises in the Blood, Afro-Caribbean disruptive sounds can be mobilized as verbal weaponry (136). Although Cooper's postcolonial, feminist paradigm, invested in counter-discursive subversion, continues a tradition of artistic evaluation primarily in terms of verbal reference, she importantly demands an expanded reading strategy that takes into account the "noise" or voice of oral culture (4-5). Senior herself declares, "The concept of the voice is crucial to my thinking for it is the means by which I believe we bridge the two traditions of the scribal and oral" ("Poem" 35). Using Cooper's work as a point of departure, and re-reading (Edward) Kamau Brathwaite's and Gordon Rohlehr's performance criticism in light of body-memory poetics, I argue that this extension of our critical practice to include aurality/orality is also a critical move from a reading almost exclusively preoccupied with verbal reference to one that includes verbal rhythm. I maintain that verbal rhythms, fluctuations, and pulses of Afro-Caribbean speech rituals, for example, mark Senior's work as a kind of "verbal marronage" (Cooper 136), and that this aural disruption facilitates an understanding of the ways in which cultural retention becomes a revolutionary weapon against discursive oppression. Her female personae's revolts against colonialism, patriarchy, poverty, and other damaging discourses are captured in the sounds of Senior's semiotic sedition. Situating Olive Senior's tonal turbulence in the tradition of Afro-Caribbean ritual performance that foregrounds verbal marronage helps to provide a theoretical context for conceptualizing Senior's poetics of sound in particular, and African-diasporic trauma literature in general. In her review of Carolyn Cooper's Noises in the Blood, Barbara Lalla classifies Cooper's cultural critique as performance criticism, and this labelling highlights the impact of Afro-Caribbean performance traditions on our scribal production (see Lalla). Although Lalla's christening of such critical practice is fairly recent, Caribbean literary and cultural critics of an earlier generation, such as Kamau Brathwaite and Gordon Rohlehr, have been producing for some time what is now belatedly called "performance criticism." (2) Lalla's review suggests that performance critics explore the significant relationship in Afro-Caribbean literary production between the scribal and oral traditions, between print and performance, and, as I will argue, between verbal reference and verbal rhythm. While Caribbean scholars such as Maureen Warner-Lewis, Edward Baugh, Curwen Best, and Idara Hippolyte (3) have begun to ask crucial questions about the relationship between performance and literary studies, I would like to begin to trace the conceptual connections among damaging discourses, ritual performance, and postcolonial resistance. I am

not so much invested in establishing chronology and lines of influences as I am concerned with the ideas that have coalesced into what Lalla calls performance criticism, and the value of these ideas in understanding African diasporic writing. What conceptual purchase may be derived from such terms as nation language (Brathwaite, History), voice print (Rohlehr) or verbal marronage (Cooper) when they are used in performance criticism? Moreover, since the concepts underlying all these terms seem to rest on notions of ritual repetition and re-composition, I would like to propose body-memory theory as a framework for re-reading Caribbean performance poetics. In texts ranging from Brathwaite's History of the Voice and Rohlehr's Voice Print to Cooper's Noises in the Blood, Caribbean cultural critics have recognized the subversive tactics of AfroCaribbean expressive rituals to help postcolonial subjects survive both discursive and physical atrocities. While by now theories of resistance have become de rigueur for both postcolonial and feminist studies, I think it is worthwhile to re-evaluate their significance (given the persistence of neo-colonial hegemonic regimes) and to refine our understanding of the role of orality/aurality in our poetics of resistance. In two talks, "The African Presence in Caribbean Literature" and History of the Voice, Brathwaite establishes a clear relationship between Afro-Caribbean performance traditions and West Indian (resistance) literature by way of what I call a performance poetics of eruption. In the first talk, Brathwaite challenges claims that "the Middle Passage destroyed the culture of [African diasporic people in the Caribbean]" by invoking notions of cultural survival and adaptation ("African" 191). For him, "African culture not only crossed the Atlantic, it crossed, survived and creatively adapted itself to its new environment" (192). In Brathwaite's 1970s, anti-colonial ideological positioning, (4) he rejects the predominantly colonial epistemology and reclaims a pre-colonial cosmology in order to construct a counter-cultural aesthetics of indigenization (204). Elaborated in History of the Voice, his nation language poetics, on which he builds his aesthetics of indigenization, advocates a radical postcolonial art form that "redefine[s] literature to include the nonscribal material of the folk/oral tradition" ("African" 204). In this redefinition, Brathwaite emphasizes the verbal soundscape of the arts--the sound symbols, tunes, tones, and rhythms--instead of the verbal reference predominant in much of Caribbean and Caribbean-Canadian criticism. (5) In delineating the characteristics of nation language in terms of orality, Brathwaite therefore insists on recognizing sound as central to an oral poetics: "The poetry, the culture itself, exists not in a dictionary but in the tradition of the spoken word. It is based as much on sound as it is on song. That is to say, the noise it makes is part of its meaning" (History 17, emph. mine). Although Brathwaite seems at times to privilege sound over sight, I would like to emphasize his more useful point that sound is as important as sight, or, as I am proposing, that syntactic rhythm is as important as semantic reference in Afro-Caribbean poetry. Brathwaite's emphasis on the "tonal shape of the language, its paranoia about whom his wife might be having an affair with and he resents Othello being promoted before himself, it seems that from his speech that the thing he hates most about Othello is the colour of his skin. Because of this he uses unintelligent and colloquial racism to insult Othello. He refers to Othello as, "Thick lips," and calls out to Barbantio, "Even now, now, very now an old black ram

Is tupping your white ewe..." By presenting the villain of the play to have such deep-rooted racism, Shakespeare is denouncing those who attack people purely on the basis of the colour of their skin or their nationality. A modern audience would hence see that in their view, rightly, Shakespeare is sending an antiracist message. The portrayal of Othello is the most important in deciding how a modern audience would react to the play in terms of race is very important. It is of utmost importance because the audience's interpretation of Othello will define how they feel to what Shakespeare's views are about race and it's impact or domination, if there is any, of good and bad character. On the face of it, Othello seems to be the tragic hero of the play. However, it can be argued that Othello is shown to be a proud man who eventually becomes a beast, a murderer and hence in a way fulfils the prejudices with which his enemies brand him. They also argue that Othello is portrayed as devious because he 'steals' Desdemona from Barbantio and then announces he has a clear conscience, "...I must be found, My parts, my title and my perfect soul." On the subject of whether Othello becomes a beast and a murderer, some critics suggest that Shakespeare is promoting racial stereotypes because it is shown in Othello how, "The stuff of which he (Othello) is made begins to deteriorate and show itself unfit." Some would also argue that a person cannot be manipulated so quickly and be so nave as to fall for Iago's plot so quickly as Othello does in Act4, Scene 1. Before this scene Othello lets it known that, "I do not think but Desdemona's honest." But after only being presented with a handkerchief as evidence and a few words of opinion from Iago he is requesting from Iago, "Get me some poison..." But most brutal of all is the way he kills his supposed beloved. The scene is intensely emotional as Desdemona asks, (in fear and tears as performed in the most recent R.S.C production directed by Edward Hall in 1999) for banishment rather than death. In its rejection she begs for another day of life but is ordered by the increasingly vicious Othello in a most insensitive manner, "Down strumpet." Then in a most unchristian way he denies her even a final prayer. This can be interpreted by an audience as Shakespeare suggesting that an 'evil moor', a Muslim can never be a true Christian. The deeply emotional journey that Shakespeare provides the audience with leading to Desdemona's death may, it can be argued, entice the audience to hate Othello. A modern audience would reject the idea of death being a punishment for sexual betrayal in any case. If the

audience hates Othello in this way Shakespeare is condoning or even supporting the stereotype that eventually what will come out of the moor is his violent nature and all compassion will be gone because, as Laurence Lerner argues, it is the stuff from which Othello is made. A modern audience would then deplore how Shakespeare in Othello condones racial stereotyping. However, I believe this interpretation to be incorrect. Othello is a soldier turned General with many victories under his belt. Rather than being proud he does stand out in many productions of Othello as a cultural and colourfully dressed person. There is evidence that shows how humble Othello is. Before speaking to the Duke and Barbantio he apologises, "...Rude am I in my speech, And little blessed with the soft phrase of speech." Believing he has lost Desdemona he questions himself which result in the speech, "...Haply I am black

And have not these parts of conversation

That chamberers have..." Surely these cannot be the words of a proud man. Secondly, he cannot be criticised for falling into Iago's trap. Shakespeare also includes the details of how Roderigo and tragically how Cassio also were deceived by the evil manipulations of Iago who himself admits, "I am not what I am." Finally, his treatment of Desdemona seems to be misjudgement rather than deeply rooted evil. As a soldier Othello believes his actions to be moral. He is nave; a chivalric warrior in a world run by self-interest. He has no previous experience of love and women. On the contrary he is suited to battle and warfare and thus, Desdemona is treated like the traitor of an army when Othello passes sentence. Othello's deepest feelings are exposed in his last speech. TS Elliot described the speech as a, "terrible exposure of human weakness." Here he is resigned to the fact that he did not love wisely, "But too well." He literally could not be in peace for his own or Desdemona's sake thinking that he knew that Desdemona was involved in a scandalous affair with Cassio. Othello was completely deceived; as he himself put it in his final speech, "Perplexed to the extreme." He describes himself as,

"Like the base Judean; threw the pearl away." I believe that a modern audience would see 'Othello' as a terrible tragedy. The, "noble moor," who fights the chivalric code is challenged by the ultimate deceiver and the ultimate deception; Iago and Iagoism. Desdemona has heard from stories of Othello's violent military victory and she herself too is nave for this. She has little experience of the male gender herself. As Sean McEvoy writes, "A woman's love inspired by violence finds itself prey to that violence." Race is not the issue in this case. Any soldier whether Turk. Moor, Portuguese or English who followed Othello's military code for most of his life would have the same problems fitting in to Venetian society which would almost be a new world to them; a world run by jealousy and selfinterest. As the South African critic S Plaaje wrote, "Shakespeare's drama about nobility and valour...is not the monopoly of any colour." What a majority of the audience would perceive after watching 'Othello' is that Othello's violence is unrelated to his being a moor but Shakespeare is instead discussing the, "amalgam of the noble and the jealous, the soldier and the fool and the Christian and the barbarian who is reduced to stammering brutality." A modern audience would not see Othello as the guilty and barbaric moor but as a victim of Iago and his deception. The audience instead would take would take with them a message that colour does not play a part in character. Instead those who discriminate people racially are the truly devious characters and Shakespeare shows this clearly through Iago and Barbantio. Iago himself is clear evidence that Shakespeare is not in any way condoning racism but instead he is attacking racism. The attack on Barbantio's hidden racist views also prove that this is the case. The main message of Othello would be very positive foe a modern audience; that racism in all forms is totally unacceptable.