Did Brier 'Nansi mash up Jamaica?

[Tropicana]

Come talk to me about the role that Anansi and Anancyism has played in shaping Jamaican society and contributing to our problems?

[Tropicana]

I tried to imagine the experiences of the first African runaways. Having survived the journey to the West African coast and the horrors of the middle passage, they risked their lives to escape a brutal plantation regime. They then found themselves surrounded by an alien landscape, full of unrecognisable fauna and flora, pursued by armies of relentless militiamen. Shaggy and I discussed how, in these circumstances, the survival of the Jamaican Maroon communities throughout the entire period of Spanish and British colonialism was an incredible feat.Anansi knew the secrets of Caribbean history; he had been there at every stage of the journey. For plantation rebels and runaways, Anansi stories had provided a form of mental training, illustrating tactics which could be implemented in the field; the arts of cunning and disguise, spying and surveillance, hiding and subterfuge. Perhaps he was watching me now, camouflaged in the undergrowth, laughing gleefully at my efforts to find him.
The Maroon story Tracking Anansi came to mind. In this tale Anansi, like the Maroons, lives in a high, hidden refuge from which he descends to steal provisions for his family. Bredder Tiger follows him home. He sees Anansi sing a sweet song to his wife, and then she lets down a rope for him. Bredder Tiger tries to make his voice sweet, like Anansi’s, and sings Anansi’s song:
“Mama, mama, sen’ down rope,
Sen’ down rope, Brer Nansi deh groun’ a!”
Anansi’s wife lets the rope down and Bredder Tiger starts to climb up. Bredder Anansi sees Bredder Tiger climbing up to the hideout and shouts: “Mama, cut de rope! Mama, cut de rope!
The wife cuts the rope and Bredder Tiger falls and breaks his neck. Bredder Anansi takes him and eats him for dinner with the whole family. “They couldn’t beat Bredder Nansi at all; him was the smartest one of all,” wrote Martha Beckwith in her Jamaica Anansi Stories of 1924.

That night we stayed in one of the four small Ambassabeth eco-cabins run by cultural and community activist Lynette Wilks.

Wilks saw Anansi as a symbol of survival; she said he must be placed in his historical context to be properly understood. There were negative tricksters in Jamaican society, but also “real Anansis, who are creative, who are thinkers and planners.” There was a danger that Jamaican people were losing touch with their cultural heritage, she explained, and Anansi was a key part of that heritage.
“You can pass down your family oral history through the tales. It is a form of wisdom. Everything that we have around us is from outside, the books, TV, films. But our music, our dance and our folklore is our greatest form of resistance because it retains tremendous elements of our African history.” She insisted, “We have go back to go forward.”

Our next visit was to the captain of the Windward Maroons in Moore Town, a community founded by the legendary Nanny.

I found Captain Smith sitting meditatively on his porch in his rocking chair. The road ran right past his house, and every passer-by hailed him with gusto: “Captain!” “All right, man!” he yelled back.
Like Wilks, the captain felt that a renewed appreciation of Jamaica’s history and culture, especially among young people, was essential in the fight against crime and corrupt attitudes. Storytelling brings the community together, he said. “When I was a boy an Anansi story was told after everybody cook and eat. We used to have pretty moonshines, so you can sit outside when the time is dry, on the veranda like here, and Grandma and Grandpa would take you up in an Anansi story. You would have children coming from other homes to listen, and that would last for late night.” The captain said the English nursery rhymes, stories and sayings he learned at school felt alien to him; they did not describe his world, unlike the Anansi tales. “Without a doubt, learning about Anansi, it’s an education. You can identify.”
Captain Smith suggested that I visit Mr Bernard, chief abeng player [conch-shell horn]of the Windward Maroons. Mr Bernard was sitting on the porch of his home in Comfort Castle, contemplating his incredible view of the mountains. He smiled wryly as I approached, and immediately adopted an Anansi-like persona, feigning naivety and dim-wittedness: “Why you want to come here and speak to a dunce like me? Captain Smith sent you? He said that about me? But I am but a dunce, man, I cannot read, I cannot write…”
Mr Bernard was Anansi personified—even the captain had described him as “tricky.” He took great pleasure in baffling me, breaking into long, complicated preacher-like speeches and his Maroon language, which could be traced back to a form of Asante Twi from Ghana. How had he learnt the language, I asked. “Your ancestors who are died and gone, they just pass that over,” he replied. “You are just born in it, a gift. And you learn the word by yourself. By the spirit.”
He said he had been watching me as I walked the Cunha Cunha Pass. I began to feel goosepimples forming on my arms. He described where I had stayed, what I had eaten. He said he knew I was coming: “Some of the time I invisible, you know. You see me, but you don’t know it’s me. And I see you.” Like Anansi, Bernard had been watching me from the sidelines, playfully mocking me.
The Maroon leader Nanny, Bernard informed me, was also like Anansi. She used her intelligence to overcome her opponents. “She was tricky. She used her brains. She use science. When them shoot her with the gun, she catch the balls in her behind and shoot them right back out. Science. She kill thousands of them.”
The stories of Anansi’s skill inspired Maroon survival tactics, explained Bernard. “That is a plan of the Maroon, you know. Is these tricks of the Anansi. Now, you coming for a little Anansi story. But you are gaining bigger than that. Because you wanted to know how Anansi started to talk his story. Through we Maroon. We get in de bush. And we ambush!”

But more importantly, they felt passionately about Anansi. The popularity of the tales may be dwindling in Jamaica, as traditional forms of entertainment are replaced by television and video games, but they still saw Anansi, like Nanny, as emblematic of slave and Maroon bravery and intelligence.
Anansi and other resistance figures inspired slaves and runaways in their struggle for freedom. Through song, music, dance and folktales they preserved their humanity and their heritage, challenged the systems of their oppression and kept alive their belief that one day they could be free.
On a practical level, through these cultural forms they learnt how to fight back within the confines of the slave system. Stick-fighting dances trained them for combat, songs and drums communicated defiant secret messages and the Anansi folktales illustrated the tactics of survival in the face of oppression. Yes, the irrepressible Brer Anansi is alive and well in Jamaica, prowling the bush and reminding us all that “Cunning betta than strong.”

Read the original article here: http://caribbean-beat.com/issue-88/t...#ixzz2wt1XxvAV

So have we used anansi and his tricks into the modern era to our detriment (i.e. at a time when subtle forms of resistance are not as important.)