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Listening to rock, jazz, blues, reggae, salsa, samba,
bossa nova, juju, highlife, and mambo, one might conclude
that much of the popular music of the world is informed
by the flash of the spirit of a certain people specially
armed with improvisatory drive and brilliance.
Since the Atlantic slave trade, ancient African
organizing principles of song and dance have crossed the
seas from the Old World to the New. There they took on
new momentum, intermingling with each other and with New
World or European styles of singing and dance. Among
those principles are the dominance of a percussive
performance style (attack and vital aliveness in
sound and motion); a propensity of
multiple meter (competing meters sounding all
at once): overlapping call and response in singing
(solo/chorus, voice/instrument – "interlock
systems of performance); inner pulse control (a
"metronome sense", keeping a beat indelibly in
mind as a rhythmic common denominator in a welter of
different meters); suspended accentuation patterning
(offbeat phrasing of melodic and choreographic accents);
and, at a slightly different but equally recurrent level
of exposition, songs and dances of social allusion
(music which, however danceable and "swinging",
remorselessly contrasts social imperfections against
implied criteria for perfect living).
Flash of the Spirit is about visual
and philosophic streams of creativity and
imagination, running parallel to the massive musical and
choreographic modalities that connect black persons of
the western hemisphere, as well as millions of European
and Asian people attracted to and performing their
styles, to Mother Africa. Aspects of the art and
philosophy of the Yoruba of Nigeria and the Republic of
Benin; the Bakongo of Bas-Zaire and the neighboring
Cabinda, Congo-Brazzaville, and Angola; the Fon and Ewe
of the Republic of Benin and Togo; the Mande of Mali and
neighboring territory; and the Ejagham of the Cross River
in southeastern Nigeria and southwestern Cameroon; have
come from sub-Saharan Africa to the western hemisphere.
All of these traditions are ancient and charged with
nobility of blood and purpose. And all of them, with the
exception of the villager Ejagham, are urban. Since the
Middle Ages or earlier, the ancestors of the Yoruba, the
Bakongo, the Fon, and the Mande peoples have lived in
commanding towns, centers of visual richness and
creativity. Even the Ejagham, with their widely imitated
important men and women associations, founded
respectively under the sign of the leopard and the
crocodile – emblematic of intimidating powers of
moral vengeance and strong government – live
surrounded by miniature versions of the trappings of the
courts of ancient urban queens and kings.
These civilizations not only were impressive for their
urban density, refinement, and complexity, but were
empowered with an inner momentum of conviction and poise
that sent them spiraling out into the world, overcoming
accidents of class, status, and political oppression. The
rise, development, and achievement of Yoruba, Kongo, Fon,
Mande, and Ejagham art and philosophy fused with new
elements overseas, shaping and defining the black
Atlantic visual tradition. To portray not only the
originating impulses of these different black
civilizations but some sense of the special inner drive
and confidence that has kept them going – that
showered the northeast of Brazil with famous beads and
emblems and gowns of the Yoruba and Dahomey; that
fundamentally enriched the culture of North America with
profound and sophisticated Kongo- and Angola- influenced
herbalism, mental healing and funereal traditions among
black people of the Old Deep American South and so on
– this is the scope and sweep and purpose of this
book...
...Flash of the Spirit opens with a discussion of the
art and ideals of the Yoruba, black Africa's largest
population, creators of one of the premier cultures of
the world. The Yoruba believe themselves descended from
goddesses and gods, from an ancient spiritual capital,
Ile-Ile....There are thousands of deities in Yoruba
territory, western Nigeria and eastern Benin Republic,
but only the most widely worshipped and important
survived the vicissitudes of the Atlantic Trade...I offer
portraits of ten orisha, deities
of the Yoruba, to represent the impact of the mind
and spirit of millions of Yoruba in West Africa on key
black urban populations in the Americas, most notably in
Havana, Salvador, Brazil, and the heavily Hispanic
barrios of certain cities of the United States,
especially Miami and New York. In other words, the
richness of detail, moral elaboration, and emblematic
power that characterize the sacred art of Yoruba in
transition to Brazil, Cuba and the United States, as
sampled in this volume, is but an introduction to the
wider universe of interlocking forms that will require
future books fully to explore and explain. [see Ken Brown's description of the amula
buried in the ground in what he interprets as the curer's cabin at the Jordan
Plantation for an example of Yoruba ritual manifested in
material culture].
Also widespread across the black Atlantic world are
the signs and insights of the great Kongo people of
Zaire, Angola, Cabinda, and Congo-Brazzaville. There is a
clear connection between the cosmographic signs of
spiritual renaissance in the classical religion of the
Bakongo and similarly chalked signs of initiation among
blacks of Cuba, Haiti, the island of St. Vincent, the
United States, and Brazil where numerous Kongo slaves
arrived. The Kongo sign of the four moments of the sun
– dawn, noon, sunset, and the mirrored noon of the
dead that we call midnight – the master icon of
their religious and philosophic works, informs the rituals of heavily
Kongo-influenced parts of the new world...These can
be compared with yet more signs, richly reflecting
Christian and other Western influences, on the isle of
St. Vincent in the black Caribbean and with others found
among Kongo-Cubans and U.S. mainland blacks from Memphis
to the Carolina coast. These drawings and their
accompanying rituals of healing and/or initiation reflect
the confluence of originating Kongo impulses plus other
African and European influences.
In Haiti occurred a deep synthesis of the main forms
and tenets of the classical religions of the Yoruba, the
Dahomeans, and the Bakongo that was partly informed by
the saints of the Roman Catholic Church and by their
attributes. The result was vodun: formally
speaking, one of the richest and most misunderstood
religions of the planet...
...Flash of the Spirit, then, illumines the
art and philosophy connecting black Atlantic worlds. I
hope, in opening some of these lines of inquiry, that the
identification and explanation of some of these
mainlines, intellectually perceived and sensuously
appreciated, will provide a measure of the achievement of
African civilizations in transition to the West, for
theirs is one the great migration styles in the history
of the planet.
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