.... The retentions associated with the Congo were indeed linguistic but focused on Kumina, an Afro-Jamaican ritual, thought to have been brought to Jamaica from the Congo by indentured laborers in the postslavery period. Interviews with Queenie Kennedy, a famous Kumina leader, and laborious transcriptions...

... and Tobago; to the vodun in Haiti; to the winti in Suriname and kumfa in Guyana; or with ancestors, such as those observing Maroon reli- gions in Suriname and Jamaica; kumina, convince, and etu in Jamaica; saraka and nation dance in Carriacou and Tobago; and palo monte in Cuba. Dreams...

... 2023 by Small Axe, Inc. 2023 colonial education Yoruba language African slave indentured labor Kumina Black Power Eric Williams Kamau Brathwaite Paul Lovejoy Caribbean-oriented press Maureen Warner-Lewis, 1993, Lopez Photography, Kingston, Jamaica. Courtesy of Maureen Warner-Lewis...

... fenced-off compound.” 1 This is part of Maureen Warner-Lewis’s narration of an extraordinary interview conducted with Kumina spiritual leader Imogene “Queenie” Kennedy in 1971. The interview has multiple afterlives, and doubtless origins as well; indeed, I hope to show in what follows that part...

... at the Edna Manley School of Art. The course presented an appreciation for the African influences on Jamaican culture, including a field trip to a Kumina ceremony (a religious ceremony that has managed to survive the influences of Western culture, where languages and dances can be traced back to tribes...

... by a spiritual practice invoked to frame mourning for a beloved family member, such as Kumina; Kamau’s first wife, Doris (“Mex”); or jazz in the face of senseless carnage (9/11). 37 Once more, by bringing us to think about death, Kamau also brings us to understand how we live, where we live, and the role...

... was not just ailing but put down for good. Kumina Queen (Ma Ma, what did you learn?) That my step is your step the spin, dip, twirl backbend, is one to pass...

... in some of Nettleford’s choreography. In the popular Kumina (based on the Kikongo diasporic rite), which premiered in 1971, the dancers move diagonally in alternating waves, while circular hip rotations work contrapuntally with entrances and exits. 20 They overlap, become visible, and then disappear...

... of this psychocultural wake work in poems and in the embodied reenactment of ancestral grief in Kumina, the Nine Night, and other spiritual practices. Although elegies, perhaps misunderstood as belonging to a prototypically European genre, have been largely neglected in this context, they are arguably among African...

... perennial stare on the other tree. She would catch us, and Kumina-talk: “Oui, kinte pan you malu and tek back a boi fi me.” And we would bring her “boi,” the cigarette she would...

... by the nation-state. It is, like “strategic flexibility,” grounded in relationships and in a troubling of modernist understandings of time and space. Whether working with the Charles Town Maroon community, or with practitioners of kumina, or with women in central Jamaica who have been protesting the extension...

..., and rehearsals and revisions of other texts to produce an occulted text. This assemblage of heterogenous archival resources is capped metaphorically by the trope of possession as narrated in the next section, “The Word,” the “authentic inner plantation statement” of Queenie, the Kumina Queen, whose existential...

... was somehow yearning for the immaterial as well—those deeply motivating metaphorics of bone and blood, which draw their power from the conjoined meaning of both body and not-body, of spirit. And, too, the insistent reference to religions, to Myal and Revival, Kumina and Obeah, Orisha and Vodou, which...

.... NDTC’s early dance works, which drew upon Edward Seaga’s anthropological research on Pocomania, Kumina, Revivalism, Maroon and other traditions, including Bruckins, Deadyard ceremonies, Dinky Mini, Jonkonnu, Rastafari, and popular urban dance sought to confi rm the “physical, cultural...

... other ones. Rastafari, dancehall, calypso, Obeah, Kumina, Ifá, mas’, and jab are just a few examples of the ways Caribbean Black people in the margins, alongside other Black people in the African diaspora, have led wayward lives , engaged in beautiful experiments , and employed the spiritual...

... and, on that morning, site of a performance depicting through kumina ritual the atrocities of the white-on-black violence of slavery, one person postulated that the artist’s clothing or his way of speech may have identified him as a foreigner, and commented that for many in Jamaica, foreign...

... an (educated) distinction between ‘statements of fact’ and ‘symbolic statement’—thus vitiating the very spirit of creole language/experience. 53 This is why I have juxtaposed the quotation from Smith (above) with the tape-transcript from a Jamaican Kumina Queen. This authentic inner plantation statement...

... are to be wed. Modibe’s involvement recovers the indentured African from invisibility in previous writings on Morant Bay, such as Reid’s New Day . After Modibe’s death, Maud is asked to lead the funeral procession, a sequence that resembles the tradition of kumina that in interviews Brodber associates...

... and melodic capacity of percussive elements that appear in dub.⁸ aaxexe During and after slavery, the Afro-Creole community practiced rituals such as Kumina and Ettu, which, as adaptations and remnants of African “danced faiths refl ected the belief that ancestral spirits can be induced...

... communities, such as Kumina and Convince in St. Thomas, Jamaica.52 Individuals are commonly known by people in their communities as obeahmen or obeahwomen, but individuals so identified rarely use this term to describe themselves.53 In Trinidad, one of the most famous reputed obeah practitioners...