...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...

... they are following, most striking is the song 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...

..., 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 in the caricaturesque bufo theatre and made internationally famous by Afro-Cuban musician Ignacio Villa. 51 Although one could view this revision...

... 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...

...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...

...-Jacques Dessalines, Moïse, 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...

... 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...

... control over land was seen as a core value. Also of note, the counterplantation system was to a crucial extent built by women, who sought to construct an order that reversed and reconfigured the layered forms of oppression they had experienced within the slave system. 1 That history of achievement...

... 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...

... and language of dissimulation. 11 To locate the registers of enslaved people, she had to search for “property” within the financial records of Her Majesty’s Treasury and the Office of Registry of Colonial Slaves and Slave Compensation Commission, which had been charged with reimbursing those designated...

... 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...

... these boundaries, either conceptually or geographically. It spans across all of the Americas, Afro–North America not excluded. It ranges in and out of mountain-based “reservations” of ex-slave black guerrilla warriors metamorphosing Africa in new terrain and in new domains. Marooning itself, “Black Metamorphosis...

... order of consciousness. As noted above, musical inventions are anchored to associative sounds, lyrics, myths, rituals, songs, and experiences (185–87, 191–97). As well, musical inventions not only cushion “the shock of dispossession,” they “oppose it, by reminding, at deep psychic levels...

... “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...

.... 17 Karwan Fatah-Black, “Appropriating Anton de Kom Today: Canonization, Translation, Celebration,” this issue of Small Axe , 78–86; Mitchell Esajas, “More Relevant Than Ever: We Slaves of Suriname Today,” this issue of Small Axe , 87–99. 18 Markus Balkenhol, “Canonizing De Kom: Sacrality...

... tory Haiti Has. I used a seismic metaphor for connotations. “History and Haiti” only two weeks before the Haiti, as a Nation, uses every cultural tool earthquake. So I’ll avoid that. But History as in its box to transmit its History, from song Lava, bubbling and spitting...

... it as a literary genre. 37 Writer and anthropologist Miguel Barnet, editor and oral historian of Autobiography of a Runaway Slave ( Autobiografía de un cimarrón ), who saw the testimonial novel as a form of popular literature in keeping with the populist thrust of the early Cuban revolutionary period...