...Kathleen Donegan This essay concentrates on the relation between song and history in the lives of the enslaved and the afterlives of slavery, particularly by tracing the history of the song “Take Him to the Gulley,” which became known as “the famous slave song of Jamaica.” Thinking alongside...

... of an enslaved person sung by his grandmother in a hoarse voice: “She carried the lament for dead slaves . . . come-a look / come-a look / see wha’ happen / Sookey dead, Sookey dead, Sookey dead-o.” 38 That song is earlier introduced in the poem “Ancestors,” from Islands , which tells of the stoic...

... todos tomamos café” (“in Cuba, all blacks and all whites and everyone drinks coffee”). This phrase revises the famous lyrics, “Ay, Mamá Inés, todos los negros tomamos café” (“Ay, Mama Inés, all us blacks drink coffee”), from a song that was originally composed by plantation slaves, then used...

... to the masses, as it is always controversial, provocative, and ahead of its time. However, whether or not the aim of Redemption Song was to expand the Jamaican aesthetic, this objective would be inappropriate for a national monument to the eman- cipation of slaves. Private art, which artists fashion solely...

... meeting for the first time, and it served to remind them of the persons and activities and mannerisms of family members whom they had known in their youth. This stimulus prompted their recall of many songs and sayings. In any event, biographical information was uncommon in Caribbean ex-slave societies...

...Petrina Dacres Small Axe Incorporated 2004 An Interview with Laura Facey Cooper Petrina Dacres aura Facey Cooper, one of Jamaica’s exceptional artists, is the creator of the most recent public sculpture created to commemorate Emancipation, Redemption Song. It features...

... SX26 • June 2008 • M. NourbeSe Philip | 105 ran the slave ran ma ma mma mai mai bard sing stir my thirst for song a ruse...

..., and Henri Christophe and the supporting characters are Toussaint’s soldiers; then he adds, “Two women play major roles; one, a white woman, the wife of a former slave-owner, sympathetic to the slave revolution; the other, a mulatto, a former slave, who is a sexual target for all sections of the population...

... of subjectivity and community exemplifies what Baker describes as “language (the code) ‘speaking’ the subject . . . [, a process whereby] the subject is ‘decen- tered.’ ”8 Through her depiction of Ella/Louisiana’s possession—which, significantly, is initiated through a folk song—Brodber shows how the voices...

... See Max Beauvoir, Le grand recueil sacré; ou, Répertoire des chansons du Vodou haïtien (Port-au-Prince: Koleksyon Memwa Vivan, 2008); and Benjamin Hebblethwaite, Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012). Pioneering and illuminating analyses of Vodou...

... and international media regarding the prolonged public debate about the meaning of Redemption Song, Laura Facey Cooper’s dubious monument to the 1838 emancipation of enslaved Afri- Icans in Jamaica. Inevitably, there is some repetition, as my argument is elaborated in a variety of contexts and media...

... Redemption Song, like many other public monuments that are controversially received in Jamaica, is important because it can reveal specifi c postcolonial investments in history, identity, and memory. Redemption Song is placed in Emancipation Park, which was designed at the turn of the twenty-fi rst...

.... No one was going to give her credit for spending a year within the horrors of slave registers or another trying to track a foot soldier who would become a slave owner through the ledgers of regiments of the British Army sent to the West Indies in the late eighteenth century. From the submission...

... 119 DISCUSSION FORUM: REDEMPTION SONG, LAURA FACEY COOPER’S EMANCIPATION MONUMENT An Interview with Laura Facey Cooper Petrina Dacres 125 Monument and Meaning Petrina Dacres 137...

... and escape like slaves.” 4 The only extant English translation fails to translate the point of this neologizing poem. 5 There are three variations over time: “marronnons-les Depestre marronnons-les” in 1956 becomes “marronnerons-nous Depestre marronnerons-nous?” in 1976, while “rions buvons et...

... (the racial economies and racial histories that underpin the production and distribution of black creative works), lyrical content (if the tune indeed has lyrics), and the waveforms that underpin and sonically frame song. 2 Black musical aesthetics not only emerge within and against long-standing antiblack...

... “piece of ground.” Ground provisions, in the broader meaning, are provisions from the provision ground. After the abolition of slavery, the ex-slaves and their descendants continued to refer to their homegrown food as provision and any piece of land over which they had some...

... to redress it by describing as fully as possible the conditions that determine the appearance of Venus and that dictate her silence. In this incarnation, she appears in the archive of slavery as a dead girl named in a legal indict- ment against a slave ship captain tried for the murder...

... in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939). 30 Saidiya V. Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). 31 Warner-Lewis, introduction to Central Africa in the Caribbean , xxv–xxvi. 32 Warner-Lewis...

... Suriname ( We Slaves of Suriname ). 1 Schooled as I was in what some have described as a Caribbean intellectual tradition, and with the intention of moving from Jamaica to the Netherlands, I had inquired of friends and colleagues about works by Dutch thinkers who were similarly concerned...