‘Her body she always usta say might be in Tatem but her mind, her mind was long gone with the Ibos’. Paule Marshall introduces Avatara, a character from her novel Praisesong for the Widow (Reference Marshall1983, 39). Avatara saw the Igbos fly as a young girl. Unable to follow them physically, she joined them in spirit through a type of psychic travel. With her description, Marshall is referencing Igbo Landing, the historic site where a community of Igbos enslaved in Georgia (United States) escaped by flying across the waters back to Africa. It is considered the largest mass suicide of enslaved peoples to have occurred in the Americas, but is reclaimed in mythology not as ‘death’ but as a return to the ancestors; not as a tragedy but as a celebration of resilience, rebellion, and strength: the Igbos had refused to live in slavery, choosing instead to re-join their African ancestors through this final, defiant act of rebellion.
With this reference to Igbo Landing, Marshall reminds us that a return to cultural roots remains critically important. Yet, for persons from the African diaspora, exact ancestral origins are impossible to realise – attempts to reconstitute African histories fragmented by slavery make that task unachievable. Instead, returns to Africa necessarily must be enacted, such as through psychic or spiritual travel. ‘The “original Africa” is no longer there,’ reminds Stuart Hall. ‘It too has been transformed. History is, in that sense, irreversible’ (Reference Hall and Rutherford1990, 231). Any returns, therefore, must be accomplished ‘by another route’ (232), such as through ritual and remembrance.
The Big Drum ritual of Carriacou offers one such medium for return. A small island (two-by-seven miles), found off the coast of Grenada, Carriacou became a New World destination for some 6,000 Africans during slavery. The Big Drum was created by the island’s enslaved community as a vehicle for maintaining African ancestral knowledge systems and traditions. Guidance from African forbears was sustained through ritual songs, dances, and musical rhythms, with followers seizing and using collective memory to redefine nation. This chapter introduces the Big Drum through narratives of ‘return’, exploring the ritual as a medium for activating ancestral memories and crafting New World belonging. It is told through the works of two women – Lorna McDaniel and Zakia Sewell. Their works depict and speak to different Big Drum accounts of ‘homecoming’, including the ritual’s promise of ancestral return.
The Big Drum: An Introduction
The Big Drum ritual was established by Carriacou’s enslaved Africans as a vehicle for making spiritual returns to African homelands and for acknowledging and remembering African ancestors. For enslaved Africans, Big Drum ‘gave people a dignified identity, that of “African”, which countered the false identity that estate owners had given them as ‘slaves’ (Reference HillHill 1998, 188). Today, Big Drum continues to be performed as a medium for respecting and connecting to African ancestors, most prominently Stone Feasts – the final formal ritual of the dead that involves the placing of the deceased’s headstone. Yet, Big Drum is also played at other island celebrations where ancestral blessings are mandatory, including weddings, boat launchings and carnival’s Canboulay (the Sunday evening before Lent).
Cromanti, Igbo, Manding, Arada, Chamba, Kongo, Temne, Moko, and Banda are the nine African nations believed to represent the majority of Carriacaoans’ ancestral lineages. Collectively called the ‘Nations’, they were ‘appended to the ritual, with the peoples [of Carriacou] forming a congress of multinational representation’ (Reference McDanielMcDaniel 2002, 129) in Big Drum that has remained ‘crucial to the current generation’s memory of national origin and kinship’ (Reference McDaniel and RobertsonMcDaniel 1993, 395). By performing Nation dances and songs, Big Drum followers pay tribute to the individual ethnic groups from which they are believed to have descended. These dances and songs provide Carriacouans with lifelines to hidden slave histories and to the wisdom of revered ancestors. As a result, when participants dance to Big Drum, they are not simply stepping to their Nations’ songs. Rather, they are dancing out their individual histories, their sways and twirls revealing the biographies of who they are.Footnote 1
The dance ring, where the Big Drum ritual actions take place, is created by community members. At the centre of the ring sit three drummers, two of whom play the boula drum, which is held between the legs, slightly tilted. The master drummer plays the cutter or big drum, which rests on the ground. Standing nearby is the lead singer, a woman who, referred to as the chantwell, initiates what songs will be performed and also sings the opening texts, which are then taken up by the chorus in call-and-response. The chantwell also is responsible for playing the chac-chac, a stick-held maraca. The Big Drum ritual routinely starts with a ‘strike of a hoe blade’, after which ‘the male sponsor [of the event] consecrates or “wets” the ring with rum and his wife consecrates it with water, thus inviting the participation of the ancestors’ (Reference McDanielMcDaniel 1985, 182). It is the ancestors who take to the dance ring first. ‘Humans who dare to dance then are inviting danger’ (Reference McDanielMcDaniel 2002, 130).Footnote 2
While some participants who attend Big Drum have already acceded their Nation, a participant who has ‘lost the knowledge of his kinship’ is also invited to join (Reference McDanielMcDaniel 1985, 182). The ritual in these circumstances becomes a vehicle for reclamation; an opportunity to regain ‘lost personal nationhood or tradition … through an affinity to a particular drum beat that possessed the power to reassign one to a nation’ (Reference McDanielMcDaniel 1986, 88). Each of the surviving nine nations has been ascribed a single rhythm, which is played in turn by the ritual’s lead drummer. Three of the Nation dance rhythms, transcribed by McDaniel, are indicated in Figure 14.1.
Figure 14.1 Drum rhythms for the Cromanti, Igbo, and Manding nations.
Participants seeking to recover their African pasts stand at the side-lines and, when one particular rhythm moves them to the point of dance, they must enter the dance ring and claim their history. In other words, the Nation rhythm that draws a participant to dance is believed to be that person’s family line. As one Big Drum participant explains it, ‘The blood tells your nation.’
I wouldn’t dance any other. I feel good for the drum tells you what to do. Move as the drum tells you. The drum is speaking, telling you how to get on, how to wheel, how to come back, work your shoulders. The drum is speaking: without it you could do nothing.
Lorna McDaniel
Dr Lorna McDaniel (1938–2012) was an ethnomusicologist of acclaimed scope and accomplishment, and her research has championed new strategies for viewing Big Drum specifically and Caribbean music more broadly. During her research on Carriacou, she uncovered 129 songs and 26 dances celebrating the nine nations of Big Drum, and, through them, established a conjectural pantheon of goddesses, deities, and ancestral spirits most commonly conjured during the ritual. A book on Caribbean music would be woefully incomplete without drawing future researchers’ attention to her legacy. Toward that end, we present two key contributions from Dr McDaniel: Concept of Nation and The Flying Africans.
Concept of Nation
In McDaniel’s analysis of Big Drum, Africa transcends the boundaries of prescribed cultural and national difference. A variety of African nation groups were enslaved on Carriacou, proclaims McDaniel. In order for them to create a sense of community, a ‘social compromise’ was necessary, ‘in which classes [would be] equalised and divisions lessened’ (Reference McDaniel and Robertson1993, 408). In response, the nine African nation groups ‘form[ed] a diaspora on the island’ and ‘consolidated … all [of their] nation dancing in one ritual’ (Reference McDanielMcDaniel 2002, 129). The Big Drum, in turn, came to ‘centr[e] on the unification of the nine-nation congress’ (ibid.), where it developed into an archetype for ‘societal modelling, group bonding, and material sharing’ (Reference McDaniel and RobertsonMcDaniel 1993, 408), as well as national cohesiveness (Reference McDanielMcDaniel 2002, 138). The lyrics of the Nation songs, too, projected the ‘collective concern’ of the group by incorporating such common themes as enslavement, freedom, and spiritual connections (Reference McDaniel and RobertsonMcDaniel 1993, 403).
Yet, there continued in Big Drum ‘a desire for social differentiation and stratification, [as] implicit in the code of ethnic categorisation’. While the ritual afforded a sense of collectivity, it also, at the same time, allowed for separate nations to be acknowledged and revered. Therefore, in addition to supporting a diasporic sensibility, Big Drum ‘validated individual identities’; so, when participants took claim to particular nations during the ritual, specific histories, too, were restored (408). From this perspective, Big Drum ‘honours national exclusivity and at the same time promotes prestige in social plurality’ (Reference McDanielMcDaniel 2002, 138). It allows for the collective to coincide with the individual; for the diaspora to overlap with the national. New narratives of belonging emerge in response, which not only transcend but deconstruct the concept of nation.
Through patterns of remembering, melancholy, and experiences of belonging (and un-belonging), Africa emerged in the Big Drum as ‘less a geographic ideal than a cultural principle that celebrates the connection between living and ancestral systems as well as between human ethnic groups’ (Reference McDaniel and RobertsonMcDaniel 1993, 409). For the people of Carriacou, it no longer was the geographic locale of Igboland or Kingdom of Kongo that provided them and their families with guidance and communal strength. Instead, it was the cultural ideals that these nations represented. It was, argues McDaniel, the Concept of Nation that ‘imposed history on memory and validated the individual’s identity’ (408).
By challenging the view that the African nations in Big Drum are stable points of reference, McDaniel unsettles and calls into question the very terms of Caribbean identity. Echoing Stuart Hall’s analysis, she emphasises how cultural identity is not ‘fixed at all … not some universal or transcendental spirit inside us on which history has made no fundamental mark … not some fixed origin to which we can make some final and absolute Return’ (Reference 225Hall, Baker, Manthia and LindeborgHall 1996, 212–13). Participants, consequently, do not attend Big Drum to ‘fix ethnicity absolutely’ (to borrow from Reference GilroyGilroy 1993, 223) – they attend to nurture the creative process of assembling a sense of belonging that helps match the present with hidden pasts. Through Concept of Nation, Big Drum is not just about extracting ancestral histories – it is also about retelling those histories in ways that allow for a ‘consolidated diaspora [that nurtures] national cohesiveness, spiritual outreach, and the retention of ancestral communication’ (Reference McDanielMcDaniel 2002, 138). It reminds us that Afro-Caribbean connections to African homelands are not created from straight, unbroken lines, but are instead, as McDaniel claims, ‘realistically combed and plaited into unified strands of collective human experiences’ (409).
The Flying Africans
The theme of human aerial flight undergirds McDaniel’s interpretation of the cultural memories and social meanings conveyed in Big Drum. ‘The transplanted African often believed that at death his spirit would take flight, crossing the ocean, to join his brotherhood and ancestors’, a backwards retracing of the Middle Passage (Reference McDaniel1998, 56). An ‘old head’ McDaniel met early upon her arrival to Carriacou in the late 1980s expressed it this way: ‘The Africans who were brought here did not like it,’ he explained. ‘They just walked to the sea. They all began to sing as they spread their arms. A few rose to the sky. … The Africans flew home’ (2). Through McDaniel’s analysis, four levels of flight are evident in Big Drum (4).
1 Compositional Flight
The act of composition keeps alive the Carriacouans’ sense of lineage and family, and ensures Big Drum’s historical musical legacy is sustained. This compositional approach may involve new words being added to popular or traditional songs, ‘permit[ting] the reuse of tunes, a recycling that serves to protect and prolong the life of melodies while introducing immediate and relevant textual materials’ or be a completely new, original composition. The act of composing occurs during the Big Drum event itself, with ‘extemporised text alterations’ shared live by the chantwell through song leading (132). The newly composed lyrics often borrow upon the metaphor of homeland return, thus preserving the myths of flight in new, contemporary ways. Yet, some were emotional responses to tragedy, sung with the intent of providing solace to the community at a time of anguish or dissension. Additionally, compositions impact how ancestral heroes are acknowledged and celebrated for future generations, and, therefore, capture a legacy of remembering that places them alongside other ‘praisesongs of cultural knowledge that enliven the ancestors and the disremembered’ (166).
Lucian Duncan, one of Carriacou’s most sought-after chantwells from the late twentieth century, is considered by McDaniel as a ‘chief source’ of newly composed Big Drum songs. Duncan often took the melodies of traditional songs or religious hymns and added to them texts praising her own Nation, the Igbo. Other times, she spontaneously composed Big Drum songs around particular moments of importance in the community. The song text below is one such example. When the son of a friend of Duncan’s was arrested, she, along with the son’s mother and community, held a vigil for the incarcerated boy on the grounds of the police station. During the vigil, Duncan created a song, which she sung as a vehicle of support, reminding the boy that he was not alone – the ancestors were with him.
Chorus: Wegima mwe semblé
Wegima mwe semblé-o
Police lawen pu pwa mwe
Chantwell: Police lawen pu pwa mwe
Mie police lawen deyé mwe
Chorus: My family is here
My family is here
The police imprison me
2 Dream-Inspired Flight
‘In Carriacou, ancestors communicate through “dream messages” delivered to members of the family when the time for a feast is overdue’ (99). As another ‘old head’ explained it,
When these people die and you hear they come back and tell you something, don’t stiffen your neck, don’t harden your ears, do what they tell you. You see where I is now: I living after dream and I believe in dream, because I know what dream do to me and what dream can tell me.
Upon receiving such a dream, a Big Drum is organised in response, where ancestral spirits can visit, be honoured with bottles of liquor, and be fed, normally unsalted, cooked meats.Footnote 3 The dreams are reminders that the ‘spirits occupy a special place, a domain a mere partition away from the human world’ (99). To ‘ignore [the spirits] or prevent their participation in the lives of the living’ following a dream message would bring certain harm upon the family and community (99).
3 Spiritual Flight
The rhythms performed at Big Drum ‘operat[e] as codes that open the barriers and signal the divine, [and] serve as rhythmic banisters that guide travel into private realms of spiritual imagination’ (124). Although these ‘Signifyin(g) beats’, as McDaniel calls them, may not secure a physical flight home, they do offer a spiritual transcendence ‘brought about by the sudden insight and the reflection of Africa in the musical forms and dances created by the wanderings of Africans’ (Reference McDaniel and RobertsonMcDaniel 1993, 3). They provide participants a means ‘not simply [for] a physical displacement, but [for] a mental escape in creativity and personal spirituality’ (Reference McDanielMcDaniel 1990, 37). Dance, too, encompasses references to narratives of travel and escape. The women dancers are dressed in ‘long, wide, frilly, florid skirts … imitat[ing] a nineteenth-century European skirt that is open in the front, exposing a beautiful white slip. … [T]he outer-skirt is held out at the ends of the split, displaying the slip and creating bird-like wings’ (Reference McDanielMcDaniel 2002, 131). The men dancers, also, use their hand-held dance towels to imitate flight, extending the towels like the wings of a bird, ready to take flight (130).
Cromanti Cudjoe is considered one of the island’s ‘founding ancestors’, and frequently visits the living through dreams. A song common to Big Drum that acknowledges this venerated ancestor follows.Footnote 4
Chorus: Cromanti Cudjoe
Chantwell: C’est nation mwe sa, wé be nu
Chantwell: This is my nation, come
4 Rebellious, Physical Flight from Enslavement
‘The imagination that bestowed humans with the ability of flight clearly evolved from the desire for freedom’, writes Reference McDanielMcDaniel (1990, 38). It signified their shared experience of enslavement and collective quest for autonomy. While the previously named flight levels were also acts of resistance, challenging the constraints of slavery through mental, spiritual, or metaphorical returns to Africa, this final ‘defiant act of rebellion’ (32) represented a definitive return to Africa through ‘the ultimate act of suicide’ (38). It was ‘the ideological choice’ in securing ‘the soul’s return from exile’ (32). The most famous occurred with Igbo Landing. However, similar mass suicides also occurred in the islands of the Caribbean. Carriacou, for example, claims a cliff-high site where Africans, in a final act of defiance, are believed to have jumped and flown back to Africa. One song, performed at Big Drum, is analysed by McDaniel as a likely record of that event:
Zakia Sewell
London-born Zakia Sewell is a BBC Radio 4 producer who recently journeyed to her ancestral home of Carriacou, which she details in the podcast Big Drum on Little Carriacou. Sewell’s great-grandfather, Williamson Lambert, was one of Carriacou’s most esteemed Big Drum master drummers during the mid-twentieth century, forming with his two brothers (also drummers) one of the island’s most popular Big Drum groups, the Lambert Brothers. Attending Big Drum offered Sewell opportunities to reconnect with her great-grandfather (as well as other family members) and to determine her own African nation ‘homeland’.
Sewell’s grandparents had migrated from Carriacou to London in the early 1960s, and her mother was born in London a few years later in 1965. Relocating to the United Kingdom required her grandparents to create new geographies of belonging, both with the Caribbean and England. For her mother (a second-generation Carriacouan) and for herself (a third-generation Carriacouan) connections to ‘homeland’ emerged even more contingent and performative (Reference ForteForte 2007, 124). A sense of belonging had to be created – it is not derived automatically. In the diaspora, notions of home and identity ‘are neither universally constituted nor static’. Instead, they must be ‘made and remade, undermined, and transformed’ (Reference Clarke and ThomasClarke & Thomas 2006, 19).
With her podcast Big Drum on Little Carriacou, Sewell allows listeners to accompany her on a journey towards self-identity, to stand beside her as she sifts through her past, reclaiming what is available and coming to terms with those aspects that remain uncoverable. As a result, Big Drum on Little Carriacou extends beyond a simple record of Sewell’s Caribbean return. Rather, it traces Sewell’s reconciliation with the past, introducing ‘homecoming’ not as a destination but as a process. In following her journey, listeners acquire not only a clearer understanding of the complexities involved in constructing an African diasporic identity, but also are given an archetype for reconsidering nation.
Ethnomusicology and Big Drum in the Digital World
As a podcast, Big Drum on Little Carriacou offers listeners an opportunity to experience contemporary Big Drum in real-time.Footnote 5 Sewell engages directly with the community, who, in turn, join her in co-constructing a research narrative. Tempered by the lived experiences of the island community, Big Drum on Little Carriacou ‘speaks with’ rather than ‘speaks for’ the Carriacouans. It provides listeners with the rare – yet desperately needed – opportunity to hear the community tell its stories and share its observations about the ritual and its place within it. Listeners are afforded the privilege of joining the dance ring alongside the local peoples, to experience the playing of Nation rhythms in real-time and become witness to Big Drum’s ancestral authority. In creating these interactions, and then capturing them on audio playback, Sewell, with Big Drum on Little Carriacou, opens up a pool of data for future ethnomusicologists to use and extend through further study and interpretation.
The podcast – etymologically derived from the words ‘iPod’ and ‘broadcasting’ – represents a new passage in the development of ethnomusicology. Literally a recorded audio file that is distributed over the internet, this digital medium enables a discerning approach to ethnographic materials. The world has changed through the decades, with digital technology now a formidable force of our everyday lives. Ethnomusicology, inherently, has grown with it, with the podcast increasingly recognised as an effective methodological research strategy for producing, sifting through, and circulating research findings.
Big Drum on Little Carriacou provides a powerful opportunity for viewing how Carriacouans interact with one another and how they continue to use Big Drum to articulate, form, and understand themselves and their history of displacement. The conversations shared between Sewell and the Carriacou people challenge and reflect on the past, present, and future of Big Drum, lending meaning to individual experiences and collective remembering. Sewell’s accompanying narratives offer a detailed theoretical understanding of the study, emphasising not only the vibrancy of the Big Drum but also the transformability of on-site research more generally.
Thematic Connections
Sewell extends the two key themes of McDaniel, but repeats them with new purpose. These are discussed in the following sub-sections.
1 Flying Africans
Olivia Smith Storey views the Flying African myth through the image of desire, a longing for freedom and cross-Atlantic return (Reference Storey2004). It is this yearning, argues Storey, that governs the lives of New World Africans and their descendants, and that propels their ongoing searches for meaning and resolution despite loss and confusion. To actively search out a place of belonging that resists and subverts oppressive forces of slavery and ongoing racism is itself a pathway towards transcendence, representing yet another level of flight. With her podcast, Sewell supports Storey’s assertion, sharing with listeners her own desire of return, a yearning to define an African nation of origin.
Sewell admits that her initial motivation to travel to Carriacou was to stake ancestral claim to one African nation. Yet, the journey she charts with her podcast marks a different outcome: her trip did not end with the reclamation of a nation. Yet, by joining other Carriacouans in this shared culture of yearning and in the collective experience of displacement, Sewell establishes a form of solidarity with the Carriacou peoples, uniting with them to search out and create individual places of belonging. In so doing, Sewell establishes a process of remembering that crosses the Atlantic; that joins the memories of ‘here’ with those of ‘there’. Rather than staking claim to a particular nation, Sewell puts down roots across the wider African diaspora, triggering a complex mediation of ‘homeland’ that yields spiritual bonds with many persons from her past – and present. It represents a shared diasporic yearning of belonging that brings together a complex return that connects national and diasporic spaces, not naively embracing one over the other but rather holding them in tension. Warns James Clifford, persons across the Black diaspora in post-colonial Britain struggle ‘for different ways to be “British” – ways to stay and be different, to be British and something else complexly related to Africa and the Americas, to shared histories of enslavement, racist subordination, cultural survival, hybridisation, resistance, and political rebellion’ (Reference Clifford1994, 308; emphasis in the original). By claiming a space of belonging that unites the United Kingdom with Africa and the Caribbean, Sewell finds resolution. She articulates a contemporary model of identity that de-territorialises notions of singular cultural origins, articulating and joining a diasporic homeland, confirming the ongoing creative presence of flight through this magical power of self-definition and -reclamation (Reference StoreyStorey 2004).
Continuing with Storey’s analysis, flight is revealed in Sewell’s podcast as a signifier for surviving the traumas of slavery; a strategy for using the cultural resources from across the Black Atlantic to re-establish meaningful notions of belonging. Although the reclamation of an original homeland may have been a motivating factor behind Sewell visiting Carriacou, it becomes clear as the podcast continues that ‘home’ has extended beyond a single nationhood: it has swollen to include other places in addition to Africa. Transformed by the effects of additional migrations, impacted by acts of remembering and forgetting, ‘home’, Sewell confirms, is dynamic, only recoverable by twisting together roots and routes (Reference GilroyGilroy 1993, 19). In the end, it is the process of searching for a place in the diaspora that characterises this alternative realm of flight, the reclaiming of the diaspora involving not just a rejection of slavery’s oppressive after-effects, but their transcendence.
A second level of flight recognised in Big Drum on Little Carriacou revolves around McDaniel’s theory of ‘compositional flight’. Convincingly, Sewell has taken up the role of chantwell with her podcast. The narrative tradition that circumscribes her involvement closely represents the functions of Big Drum’s lead singer. In the podcast, she assumes the role of primary storyteller, where she recounts the genealogies behind Big Drum’s nation rhythms and marks their continued development through recorded performances of the event, often connecting the music with self-reflections and interviews with Carriacouans. By presenting past and present recordings of Big Drum, over which she narrates or superimposes extracts from interviews, Sewell participates in the reuse of Big Drum songs for wider purpose, a procedure that echoes McDaniel’s definition of ‘compositional flight’. Yet, in addition, the conversations shared between her and the Carriacou people challenge and reflect on the past, present, and future of Big Drum, which transform the podcast into a ritual space for backchannelling, reorganising, and redefining ideas and theories about Big Drum. By introducing readers to the ‘old heads’, Sewell is using the podcast to give new life to the ancestors, the contemporary digital format of the podcast dictating how Carriacou elders and their ancestral wisdom will be remembered by future generations. Sewell secures a new vestige for remembering with Big Drum for Little Carriacou, introducing yet another ‘praisesong of cultural knowledge’ that, following McDaniel’s analysis, represents a particular dimension of flight (Reference McDanielMcDaniel 1998, 166).
2 Concept of Nation
Declaring herself as Carricouan was itself a step towards building a narrative of African continuity and reclamation. By recreating and extending that narrative in her podcast, Sewell introduces an ethnography of diasporic identity formation that emphasises how belonging is created and mobilised in the Caribbean and its diaspora, and how Nation is not only to be recovered but also reconstructed. Such ethnography provides critical analysis of the highly mediated worlds within which New World Africans have lived, while acknowledging the often ambivalent and double (even triple) attachments that must be negotiated against multiple ‘homelands’.
To be meaningful, Sewell’s definition of ‘home’ had to hold the history that reflects the specific complexities of her own unique life. From that standpoint, she reworks the term ‘nation’ by ensuring it speaks to the African diaspora at large – London, Carriacou, the Goree Islands, and West Africa’s Atlantic coastline together mark her diaspora as a nation unto themselves. Indeed, Sewell’s concept of nation exceeds national boundaries, emphasising instead a diasporic spiritual space built on individual and collective pasts. It is this sense of self that Sewell documents in her podcast; this connection to a cultural diaspora that reaches well beyond single location and allows for unity in difference.
Echoing McDaniel, Sewell reminds that defining nation is not straightforward: returns to generational family are accompanied by acts of rendition and reinterpretation. What appears profound about Sewell’s claim to nation is that it defies being labelled; and in that defiance, Sewell assumes an ancestral community that comprises not only Carriacou but the wider diaspora as well. Big Drum has always been about reimagining the self through the reclamation of Africa and its cultural legacies. This promise of belonging did not bypass Sewell during her visit to Carriacou, but it did assume multiple diasporic dimensions, a necessary transformation for Sewell to make sense of her complex ancestral line. Borrowing from Stuart Hall, an ‘original’ homeland in Africa was no longer there – it too had been transformed (Reference Hall and Rutherford1990, 231). It necessarily involved a refiguring of geography and history, with ‘homeland’ assuming ‘an imaginative or figurative value we can name and feel’ (132).
Because Sewell’s concept of nation is flexible, able to mediate between space and time, return and rupture, loss and mourning, it gives voice to the dominant diasporic discourse of hybridity. Claiming difference through unity, individuality through collectivity, this concept of nation recognises the doubleness of displacement: how ‘it can be the site of both support and oppression, emancipation and confinement, solidarity and division’ (Reference AngAng 2003, 142), a site of both collaboration and opposition (Reference BhabhaBhabha 1994). To borrow further from Homi Bhabha, Sewell’s concept of nation ‘displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives’ that an originary homeland fails to address (Reference Bhabha1994, 211).
Big Drum enables followers to play an active role in negotiating identity, to reinterpret individual histories against a collective understanding of Africa. The concept of nation introduced by McDaniel and extended by Sewell reflects that in-betweenness, and typifies the ideological hybridising of the Black Atlantic. Nation does not necessarily need to reflect a single, uniform identity. Instead, it can exist within the complex spaces of the diaspora, as indicated by Sewell; or as a cultural principle, as claimed by McDaniel. By involving a sacred process of creating ancestral lineages that cross oceans and extend beyond confines of time, Big Drum and the concept of nation unlock new possibilities for individual and collective agency, connecting the physical and the spiritual, the body and the mind, as well as roots and routes, to ensure meaning in belonging.
Concluding Thoughts
McDaniel often shared the story of her first arrival to Carriacou. She stepped off the catamaran that regularly carried passengers from neighbouring Grenada only to be approached by a man asking, ‘What’s your nation?’ Unable to answer, the man laughed, wondering why she had not taken the initiative to define an ancestral lineage for herself. The people of Carriacou, the man explained, had refused to let the legacy of slavery erase or prevent the maintenance of their family histories. In brave resistance, Carriacouans established the Big Drum ritual, where African nations and ancestries could be reclaimed, declared, remembered, and celebrated.
As encouraged by the man she met at the docks of Hillsborough Bay, McDaniel did attend a Big Drum. And, like the ritual participants before her, she, too, was moved to dance – Igbo was her nation she realised. Because McDaniel was born in Antigua to Jamaican parents and grew up in Harlem, she embodied the triangular inheritance of Africa, the Caribbean, and Black America. It was a conjunctive diasporic experience that, as she often said, was both acknowledged and respected in Big Drum.
For Sewell, attending Big Drum did not connect her with a specific ancestral Nation, but instead symbolically linked her to a diasporic nationality. Big Drum on Little Carriacou represents a guide to that process, marking both the geographic and cultural journeys she undertook to access identity. With the podcast, Sewell becomes the agent of her story on Big Drum; the narrator of a new diasporic consciousness, to which this ritual remains a powerful force that helped establish that awareness. The ‘home’ she found may not have been what was originally expected. Yet, by taking claim to a spiritual diasporic homeland that connects the varied sites of identification important to her, Sewell left Carriacou as a geographer of the diaspora, and navigator of her own path towards belonging (Reference Thorsson and MarshallThorsson & Marshall 2007).
‘Every return inevitably exercises, or attempts to exercise, a right to acknowledgment,’ write Marianne Hirsch and Nancy Miller about the complexities of diasporic homelands (Reference Hirsch, Miller, Marianne and Miller2011, 18). The Stone Feast ensures and acknowledges a loved one’s return to Africa to re-join the ancestors. The feast involves five libations of rum and water, with the first offered by the recognised head of the deceased’s family line. The next libation occurs in the yard of the home where the feast will take place, and is conducted by the head of that household. The stone is then moved to the bedroom to be ‘dressed’, at which time the family of the departed offers a third libation. The following morning, the stone is moved to the tomb, where the mason gives a final offering. It is here, at a last libation, that the Big Drum is usually held.
In the feast, the stone personifies the deceased, with the libation ceremonies devised around the stone’s preparation and bringing atonement not only to the departed, but also to the living. Family members and loved ones can be heard speaking to the stone during the feast as if addressing their loved ones: ‘Dear Mama, we haven’t forgotten you. Open a way for us. Help us to pray for strength, long life and prosperity’ (Reference McDanielMcDaniel 1985, 181). The event ensures generational and cultural continuity, a reminder of the connections we maintain with those who walked before us.
McDaniel has completed her spiritual journey: her stone has been placed, and she has reunited with the ancestors. She leaves behind a legacy of research that continues to shape progressive debates on Caribbean music. To reconnect with her writings is to be reminded of her unyielding personal and academic commitment to ethnomusicology, and Caribbean studies in particular. To study her research is to petition her spirit, her work now our ‘spiritual guides’, helping us traverse the complicated histories of Africans in the New World and navigate some of the core complexities of Caribbean identity and cultural memory.
Sewell extends this critical discourse, contributing to that legacy by providing new and revised angles from which ‘return’ is studied and realised. With Sewell’s podcast, McDaniel, albeit perhaps unknown to Sewell, is remembered, appeased, and entertained, her authority inscribed and memorialised – not so unlike the headstone from the Stone Feast. Big Drum on Little Carriacou secures a cycle of knowledge, a continuum of connections (and re-connections), that, to borrow from McDaniel, ‘instruct us not only in the continuity of sensibilities, but also in the tenacity of kinship and social systems to which they are bound and for which purpose they exist’ (Reference McDaniel1985, 193).
