Ariel's Ethos: On the Moral Economy of Caribbean Experience Author(s): Holger Henke Source: Cultural Critique, No.

56 (Winter, 2004), pp. 33-63 Published by: University of Minnesota Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354716 Accessed: 13/12/2010 11:02
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ETHOS ARIEL'S
EXPERIENCE OF ECONOMY CARIBBEAN ON THEMORAL
Holger Henke

it Truthis a pathlessland,and you cannotapproach by any pathwhatsoever, by any religion,by any sect. Truth,beinglimitless,unconditioned, cannotbeorganized; by unapproachable any pathwhatsoever, be nor shouldany organization formedto leador to coerce people path. along any particular -Jiddu Krishnamurti

and organic philosophers in the Caribbean will doubt that the region is in a severe moral and ethical crisis at this historical juncture. And yet, making this assertion presupposes the existence of an indigenous moral and ethical matrix against which such a judgment can be made. More often than not, however, precisely this existence is concealed from the discourse about society and moral development in the region. The following essay pursuesperhaps too ambitiously-a number of simultaneous objects. First, it intends to highlight some of the elements of what could perhaps be called the Caribbean ethic/ethos. In this effort, the initial guiding questions are: What are the elements that circumscribe Caribbean thought? What are the motives for action? And what are the ethics of the people inhabiting the Caribbean? Later, I will read this (reconstructed) ethos/ethic against Shakespeare's play The Tempest,in particular against the figures of Ariel and (to a lesser extent) Trinculo. Both "texts," the Caribbean ethos and the Shakespearean figures, may (and I choose this word carefully, as I am setting out to explore subtle connections and discontinuities) put each other into perspective, withdraw each other's legitimacy or basic assumptions, or reinforce common premises. Second, I will argue for a view of Ariel that differs somewhat from the predominant interpretation by postcolonial
Cultural Critique56-Winter 2004-Copyright 2004 Regents of the Universityof Minnesota

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writers. This view will direct the way in which the Shakespearean figures are deployed as a lens through which I choose to consider issues pertaining to the moral economy of the Caribbean. Third, the essay is an attempt to utilize different-sometimes deliberately disjointed-registers of writing with which to map the moral landscape of Caribbean existence. Since Caribbean existence is circumscribed by a multiplicity of different discourses, themes, and cultural traditions-rationalist-positivist, mythopoetic, Afrocentric, Marxist, and so on (see, e.g., Trouillot 2002)-rather than to settle for any one of them, I consider it to be methodologically more appropriate to move back and forth between the epistemological registers implied in these discourses. The connection between ethos and ethics throughout this essay is not arbitrary, but reflects the need to consider Caribbean people as moral persons.1 This is to say that their actions and parameters of thought should be regarded as a collective attempt of structuring and making sense of the world in a culturally specific way that facilitates the emergence of a certain measure of order and predictability. Unlike the moral agent of Kantian and utilitarian theories, the Caribbean person should be regarded as a culturally embedded individual and not an abstract "ghost" acting in a cultural vacuum (Hinman n.d., 1). I intend to advance themes that, for a long time, have lingered in the discussions about Caribbean culture and identity but in the past have been centered on demonstrating the commonalities between African or Asian cultures and those of the Caribbean. While I firmly believe that these were utterly necessary in light of the required reconstruction of self- and peoplehood and the budding processes of nation building, I am equally convinced that we have reached a point where it is appropriate to expand the parameters of these debates in order to arrive at a definition of the Caribbean persona sui generis, i.e., without constructing parallel universes. This attempt is neither denying the persistent validity of cultural heritage nor does it intend at the other extreme to promote a genetic argument.2 However, it is my persuasion that the history, ontological conditions, epistemologies, and cosmologies of Caribbean peoples, in their process of mutual attraction, rejection, and mixing, have created a unique intellectual space that has come to inform their habitual ways of living and moral motivation.

ARIEL'S ETHOS i 35

When I speak of philosophical thought, I would therefore like to emphasize that I primarily refer to the everyday being of the Caribbean "subaltern," as opposed to the more "educated" and literalscriptural discourses of outstanding Caribbean thinkers such as Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James, and many others.3 As Paget Henry (2000, 2) pointed out recently, much of what can be regarded as philosophical statements in the Caribbean context are discursive practices embedded in nonphilosophical discourses or texts. While, like all intellectual work, this is work in progress, I was especially encouraged by Henry's recent fascinating and important book Caliban'sReasonand his and Wilson Harris's plea for a mythopoetic logic and the need for Caribbean writers to take greater account of this logic, or as Henry calls them, "gateways" (2000, 106, 270). Although I do not share with Harris the belief in the relative ontological irrelevance of everyday life, I believe that the call for mythopoetic discourses is well placed when we consider the moral-ethical contours of what I call "Caribbean existence." My exploration of the everyday wells of Caribbean thought, therefore, stands somewhat in contrast to Henry's groundbreaking book, which focuses on the literary, "high" tradition of Caribbean thought. Thus, I do not regard everyday discourses merely as context, but rather as the most profound space of enacting what it means to be a Caribbean person. Although I do not consider myself a "deconstructionist," I believe that this method has its merits, considering that one important feature of Caribbean existence is the persistent presence of "difference" and alterity, which give its discourse(s) an epistemological gravity that more often than not collapses them into each other (see, e.g., Benitez-Rojo 1996, 1-29; Henke 1997, 43). We will return to this aspect later, but suffice it to mention here that the intense competition between different value systems in the region tends to simultaneously validate and devalue all of them. The nature of Caribbean philosophical thought actually appears to demand that we approach it as a complex of ideas challenging us persistently to pursue-to borrow Gayatri Spivak's words-a "critique of what one cannot not want" (Landry and MacLean 1996, 28). I will attempt to integrate this approach into the very language of thought about the elements of Caribbean moral existence, which may result in a play with words and, indeed, in seemingly irrational or poetic conclusions about its

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discursive space and limits. Using pun, innuendo, double-edged irony, and so on, are autochthonous modes of Caribbean everyday discourse. By appropriating them as tools in the more highfalutin rationalist and positivistic lingua of academic discourse, we hope to contribute to a validation of Caribbean thought that will demonstrate one possible way to more appropriately represent the people of the region.4 In that, it entails an emancipation of those Caribbean intellectual traditions that have in the past often stood outside of the societal discourse.5 It may then, indeed, become what Cesaire in his 1944 essay "Poetry and Cognition" called poetic knowledge-that is, knowledge "in which man spatters the object with all of his mobilized riches" (quoted in Kelley 2000, 18).6 Thus, Ariel is flying again. As a delimiting force acting in a dense web of polycultural meanings and moral and intellectual codes, she or he has proven to represent the elements of fluidity and centrifugality in Caribbean existence. Ariel as a metatheoretical symbol for an ongoing discourse about the nature of Caribbean existence shall in the second half of this essay be the central "figure" through which I attempt to read some of the characterizations developed in the first half.

THE CARIBBEAN AS AN ANTIESSENTIALIST SPACE When conceptualizing and writing about the Caribbean, one has to be acutely aware that the complex and violent history of the region, as well as the diverse peoples that have settled and labored in it, make it extremely difficult to arrive at unanimous and universally valid conclusions and concepts about it. In this sense, the region is indeed a land in which the truth is wandering off the usual trodden paths and, to use Krishnamurti's statement in the epigraph, limitless. However, not only the great diversity of cultures and their modes of thinking and discourse contribute to this opaqueness, but also the fact that, in some of the original African, Indian, and Chinese cultures themselves, binary oppositions and logocentric discourse, Western notions of progress, the juxtaposition of wo/man and nature, and the terminality of history-to mention only a few of the hegemonic modes of thought in the region during the past four or five centuries-do not constitute the traditional epistemology.

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The nature of Caribbean thought is therefore profoundly antiessentialist. This is to say that it tends to hold the view that nature and objects are not necessarily what they seem, that they do not readily reveal their true nature (essence), or at least that they may represent different essences at different times. It tends to flatly reject monadic constructions that view reality as indivisible. Caribbean everyday discourse is engaged in an extensive use of multiple logics, code-switching, and artistic and satiric solution of possibly not resoluble contradictions and paradoxes. To the extent that these shifts and digressions are at the center of Caribbean existence, it is opposed to the notion of an essence itself. Let us consider, for example, Jamaican music icon Lee "Scratch" Perry's simultaneously idiosyncratic and clarifying-and, in my mind, quintessentially Caribbeanself-description:
I'm an artist, a musician, a magician, a writer, a singer; I'm everything. My name is Lee from the African jungle, originally from West Africa. I'm a man from somewhere else, but my origin is from Africa, straight
to Jamaica through reincarnation; reborn in Jamaica. ... I have been

programmed; many people who born again must come back to learn a lesson.... [H]ave you heard of ET?I am ET,savvy? Savvy? (quoted in Katz 2000, 1)

This cunning voice from a polyvalent, heteroclitic, hyperhybrid, Chagallian Caribbean cosmological and epistemological heterotopia7 gives a good impression of the rhizomatic-as Glissant might put it-discourse strategies in these parts. Any conceptualization of Caribbean thought will consequently have to take note of this antiessentialism and make it its fundamental basis. However, the use of terms and concepts of ethics, essentialism versus antiessentialism, and so on, may in itself very well already be a (Western) imposition on this space that inherently rejects bipolar modes of thought, while enabling polyvalent patterns of thought and enacting multipolar patterns of action.8 Due to its history the region has a number of value systems operating at various levels of societal discourse.9 Historically, and in many cases still today, the colonial values (i.e., the colonists' aesthetics, their language, their beauty ideals, and so on) have constituted the privileged discourse and defined who is "in" and who is "outside"

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society. This situation has, for example, created a competing system of social "respectability" clashing with a newer system of "reputation" (Wilson 1973). Increasingly, the colonial and neocolonial discourse has been pushed back, and a revalorization of primarily African values has come to define both social reputation and, to a lesser extent, respectability. As Rohlehr has put it in another context, Caribbean self-perception "hovers between the alternatives of adamic renewal or return, and existentialist sense of void" (1980, 14). Within this mix, we also find social and philosophical traditions from India and China.

BRIDGING THE CHASM: THE ROLE OF HUMOR IN CARIBBEAN DISCOURSE Whatever the particular mixture of these elements may be, it is apparent that the earlier described hybridity had one general consequence, which is common to most of Caribbean everyday life. I am referring to the important function of humor (by innuendo) as a mechanism to straddle competing value systems. Humor is to Caribbean everyday discourse what music is for Caribbean entertainment.10 Ultimately, neither of the latter can do without the former. The humor that is typical for the Caribbean is, however, not simply an empty and vain vessel of communication. Quite to the contrary, more often than not it embodies important lessons and truths. As a source of folk wisdom and tradition it does not establish a set of privileged and hegemonic moral rules, which may be enforced on any possible dissenters, but it strives-and usually succeeds-to demonstrate its "truth" by enabling the listener or reader to transcend his or her own frame of reference and values. It does not establish yet another center of discourse, but collapses the existing centers (Europe, Africa, India, and China) into each other in a way that allows all to recognize their humanity and-at the same time-to see themselves from the outside. It makes the "normal" self strange to itself, or rather it reminds the Caribbean self of its multiple identity sources and thus fundamentally engenders discursive empathy. In the process of laughing, the listener engages in a sort of secular transcendental experience from which he or she emerges with a higher

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consciousness of him- or herself. It is the Caribbean subaltern's way to speak and to speak back to the colonialists (and all that followed them). Humor is the Caribbean's unobtrusive strategy to establish a synthesis where only the opposition of thesis and antithesis seems to be imaginable.11 Unlike for other humorous situations, humor in Caribbean everyday discourse is a constant possibility. In his theory of humor Veatch (1998) explained that for humor to "function" it requires three components: (1) an element of normality (N), (2) the perception of a subjective moral violation in a situation (V), and (3) both V and N need to occur simultaneously. If V and N are understood as competing value systems, then it becomes immediately understandable that, unlike in the theory, humor in the Caribbean is not deliberately constructed. Caribbean everyday discourse does not require the situational spark of a constructed moral violation of what is perceived as normality in order to collapse or dissolve both elements in a humorous way. By way of the constant presence, or at least potential presence, of clashing value systems, the transcendent moment offers itself to the witty comment at any given time. While the outside observer often attributes this lifestyle to the easygoing nature of Caribbean people, for the Caribbean psyche the humorous transgression means a devaluation of the moral absolutes contained in each value system. In other words, what appears as carefree attitude in reality carries much more fundamental connotations with it. It is a relief from a persistently psychological tension that pervades many Caribbean everyday situations and much of its discourse. This situation has clear moral implications. Thus, as Veatch (1998) points out, most individuals have a "subjective moral order" vested in N. To the extent that this moral order is challenged, questioned, or humorously violated by V, N's validity is slightly reduced or at least temporarily compromised. By invoking and humorously straddling this ambivalence, however, humor becomes a bridge over which the individual can traverse the chasm that opens between competing moral systems. Thus, while Fanon (1986, 183) speaks about a "manicheism delirium," and Cesaire laments about societies "in whom fear has been cunningly instilled, who have been taught to have an inferiority complex, to tremble, kneel, despair, and behave like flunkeys" (2000, 43), we often see the Antillean laughingly shrug

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off the depth of the ontological abyss-the Valley of Non-being-she or he is standing on top of, while wondering which side to turn to, and whether to turn at all. Now, this role of humor is particularly pervasive in those Caribbean countries that have strong competing value systems (e.g., in Jamaica, Trinidad, or Guyana), while in more homogeneous Caribbean societies the prevailing traditional African concepts (e.g., in Haiti) and creolizations thereof tend to reduce the moral tensions that exist between such concepts by virtue of their ability to be sources of order and communal peace. These concepts are both of and for the community, which clearly points to their African origins (see Mbiti 1999, 200). Cultural production (including everyday discourse) in these societies often tends to de-emphasize the humorous element observed in the more diverse Caribbean societies, and focuses more on spiritual, religious, and quasi-religious cultural grammar and iconography. One field in which the insurgent and transcendental power of humor in the Caribbean has been mastered is the art of the kaiso. Among many appropriate lyrics, we may take a closer look at the Trinidadian calypsonian Mighty Sparrow's song "Obeah Wedding," which humorously contrasts two fundamentally different approaches at securing love.12While the person, a woman named Melda, is trying to attain Sparrow's love through the use of an Obeah spell (by virtue of Obeah's Akan and Igbo roots, representing the African value system), Sparrow points out to her that she does not fulfill more conventional criteria (presumably representing the European value system, as well as more universal preconditions to physical attraction). In the song Sparrow objects to her use of incense, garlic, and lard to bewitch him, and to her lack of personal hygiene. His advice to her is that if she will brush her teeth better and bathe herself regularly with soap, she will likely find a hubby without having to resort to love spells and incense-burning rituals. Interestingly, while Sparrow appears prima facie to reject the "African approach" (i.e., the Obeah witchcraft), he does not carry this criticism all the way through the song. Thus, his suggestions for a more successful approach might lead a cunumunu to become Melda's lover.13The possible West African root of the term is clearly

ARIEL'S ETHOS | 41

an expression pointing to the creole nature of the society where the obeah wedding is supposed to occur. By retaining this sympathy for Africanness, the European value system is denied absolute hegemony. Ultimately, the informed listener is laughing about the way the simultaneous presence and absence of both value systems converges in this particular courtship situation. Both end up putting each other in perspective and coexist rather than compete with each other. Humor transcends the moral divisions of everyday discourse. Ambivalences in Caribbean discourse are embedded in language itself, a language that in many instances has been pieced together on the basis of some European language, but which carries significant remnants of African, Indian, and other languages. The most prevalent forms of humor in Caribbean discourse therefore are pun and innuendo, which are both based on linguistic ambiguity. Here humor is both embodied in and serves as the instrument for the transcendence of ambiguity and multiple codings.

TIME, COMMUNITY, COUNTERTIME A deep understanding of Caribbean existence cannot escape the fact that time is conceived differently in the region than in the industrialized West. The well-known "soon come" and "any time is Trinidad time" have actually become distinct selling features for travel agencies offering Caribbean vacations to bag-eyed Americans, Britons, or Germans. As will be demonstrated later ("soon come"), this seemingly trivial observation also has moral implications. Again, it is important to emphasize that there are various concepts of time competing with each other, and the various ways in which time is conceived or produced depend on the particular social and economic circumstances of an individual or a community. Thus, the perception of time stands in an intimate relation to the particular mode of production it is engaged in. However, before we go into this aspect, the role of origin(s) has to be brought into the picture. Cosmologies and epistemologies profoundly different from the European concepts were invisible travelers of the Middle Passage. A linear concept of time such as in Western

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thought, with an indefinite past, present, and infinite future is differently constructed in traditional African society. The traditional African concept of time is mainly event-driven, concrete, and-unlike modern European concepts-not measured in abstract intervals:
Time has to be experienced to make sense or to become real. A person experiences time partly in his own individual life, and partly through society which goes back many generations before his own birth. Since what is the future has not been experienced, it does not make sense; it cannot, therefore, constitute part of time, and people do not know how to think about it-unless, of course, it is something which falls within the rhythm of natural phenomena. (Mbiti 1999, 17)14

Without question, this concept of time is inextricably bound with a cosmology and religion that values community and, thus, morality as a social and public affair. Different concepts of time have clashed in the region. As Birth (1999) has explained in great detail, the previously described prevalent African conception of time was forcibly replaced by European clock time. The latter stood for the temporal rigidities and, by implication, the racist hierarchies and ethnocentric value systems introduced and perpetuated by the colonial plantation system. But clock time also stood for a moral order that put a premium on the individual rather than on the community as a whole. In fact, it actually stood for the imposition of temporal ownership of a largely atomized expatriate group over other people's labor, indeed, their bodies and therefore their existence. Of course, with the persistence of capitalist working arrangements in largely urban environments, technological time continues to be the defining concept for the scheduling of many, if not most, significant daily activities throughout the Caribbean. In contrast, as Glissant (1989, 93) points out, the Caribbean person intuitively and defiantly rejects any set notion of time, particularly clock time. The ideal becomes a "non-defined understanding" of time, a concept of time that does not measure in fixed divisions, but rather according to what in a given context appears to be the natural dynamic or sequence of events. This natural, more fluid understanding of time is, for example, embodied in Trinidadian "liming." Liming, a contradiction to clock time, is by definition a social affair. An individual alone cannot lime (Eriksen 1990). It requires a group of

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like-minded companions-family, perhaps, or friends-who "hang out" together and follow the flow of the group's collective will and mood(s) in their activities. Clock time is the last thing on their minds. Thus, while liming actively opposes exogenous ways of rigidly organizing labor and/or leisure, it posits an ethic of community against the ascetic rationalism inherent in capitalism and Protestantism.15 In liming the primacy of community, understood as a natural and largely voluntary system of rules, is resurrected or asserted through the imposition-or rather lack-of (a sequence of) group action(s).16 It is rather a democratic enterprise than a hierarchically structured process. Without doubt, liming as an activity ought to be considered as a Caribbean form of resistance to an ethic for which "wasting time is the first and in principle most serious of all sins":
Loss of time because of conviviality, luxury, even because of more than the necessary and healthy amount of sleep-6 to 8 hours at most-is morally absolutely detestable. (Weber1973, 159; my translation)

It is important to note that while both ethics are essential concepts, the Caribbean ethos is really the movement, the constant negotiation between the poles defining the two extremes. Thus, as Birth (1999, 134-42) points out correctly, glosses such as "jus' now," "soon come," or "any time is Trinidad time" are widely used placeholders that simultaneously demarcate the conflict of two or more different ethics (here, temporal concepts) and help to defuse or negotiate this conflict. While they never really resolve the fundamental existing antagonism, they serve as markers that establish a common ground that most parties to the conflict intuitively recognize as an inalienable part of their (national) identity. Thus, these markers implicitly say, "This is who we are as Trinidadians, Jamaicans, Caribbeans. They-the conflict and the glosses-are what make us us." Thus, the Caribbean's unique moral condition oscillates between essentialist positions. In other words, the Caribbean persona tends to reject either/or dichotomies and prefers to embrace explicitly contextualized and synergetic concepts of moral valorization as part of its identity. This impulse is strongest among the ethnic majority in the region, the people of African origin, and it stands in constant contrast to the official Eurocentric (political) system.

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It should be obvious that in the earlier sketched Protestantcapitalist (work) ethic, individualism is the basic organizing principle. The corollary of de-emphasizing community can be found in the Western tendency to moral abstraction, such as described, for example, in Kant's hypothetical imperative. Without doubt, as form(ality) this ethos is also inscribed in the symbolic landscape (and the mindscape) inhabited by Caribbean people (cf. Abrahams 1983, 140). One might even go so far as to suggest that liming is a distant echo of aristocratic European concepts of leisurely individualism. However, in Afro-Caribbean tradition there is a greater emphasis on limiting individualism by the demands of the community (see, e.g., Gbadegesin 1998, 293). These traditions have survived in the Caribbean. Thus, as Mintz and Trouillot point out, in Haitian vodou "the difference between good and evil is realized in practice rather than through some essential manicheism as in Christianity" (1998, 131). While the imposed moral value system puts a premium on individualism and egocentrism, the morality of Caribbean society is characterized by a fundamental anthropocentrism.17 In this tradition, a person who simply watches while children fight or when conflict occurs between adults is not a good person.18 The communal aspect of (several) Caribbean societies is, however, not simply an African tradition, but also has deep roots in Hindu philosophy and religion.19Although there is a strong emphasis on community in this tradition, it is important to keep in mind that while moral concepts such as justice are certainly a part of it, they are somewhat broken through the social divisions implemented through the caste system. Although the caste system and its pertinent notions of purity and pollution clearly stand in contrast to the theory of universal justice in European thought, they also show parallels to its classbased praxis.20There can be no doubt that the rigidity of the caste system has become seriously undermined in the creolized/creolizing societies of the Caribbean, but given the original epistemology and cosmology of African and Hindu philosophy, it has to be noted that both Africans and East Indians approached the dominant (i.e., European) power structures from a different epistemological basis. Thus, while African moral concepts were diametrically opposed to European classist (and, of course, racist) rule and its adjacent notion of

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individualism, East Indian ethics-while equally opposed to the abuses at some level able to and indignities of their indentureship-were accommodate the rigidities and rituals of a hierarchical social order. In much of Caribbean and Latin American writing, the conflict between European and creolized Afro-Asian moralities has been symbolically expressed by the figures of Prospero and Caliban in Shakespeare's play The Tempestand an entire body of both academic and creative literature based on or inspired by it. I would like to cast my following interpretation of the Caribbean moral landscape in this tradition. However, it is my intention to rehabilitate the figure of Ariel, who can be seen to negotiate between the usually more prominently considered Caliban and Prospero.

ARIEL'S RETURN Hegemonic discourse cannot simply confine itself to establishing a taxonomy of civilization, i.e., defining the agents of civilization and the subjects of subjugation. The social dynamics of oppressive rule demand a more continuous production of stereotypical "civility" and "barbarism" (Brown 1985, 58). Throughout the Caribbean, intellectual discourse has in the last forty or so years used the ProsperoCaliban antagonism as a metaphor to describe and analyze the colonial and postcolonial relations between the discursive center and its periphery.21 However, there is also a case to be made for Ariel, the elusive, ghostlike, creative, spirit-force, who-albeit being his master's instrument-nevertheless moves the unfolding plot of power, subordination, and revelation by the way of his otherworldly and intangible, invisible hand. As I will argue, Ariel appears to personify the force of ideas that only slowly and incrementally move the course of history, but, once recognized for what they are, become a resource that cannot be resisted even by armies. We recall that Shakespeare's Ariel had left the stage to live "under the blossom that hangs on the bough" (5.1.94). But let us suppose for a second that he has forgotten something and returns after all others have left the stage; time may have passed, but as always, an audience is there:

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he aroundin wonderment, doesn't ARIELentersstagefromthe left,still. Looking seemto find himselfwherehe wantedto be.He leavesthe stage to minglewith Chant"is playing from imaginative the audience.Bob Marley's "Rastaman Ariel clearshis ears. Whilewalkingoffstage, betweenthe reader's loudspeakers throat,thenbeginsto speak: Anyone here named Pablo?Pablo Picasso? (No Well, anybody here who can Nobody? (Thinking) replyfromtheaudience.) explain the origin of Cubism? (Pauses)Oh, perhaps it is too early to ask. You're just enjoying 1611, 1838, 1933, 1989, or thereabout! (Loud,impatient) Well, what are you staring at me for, then? Go home, people, the show is over. Go back to Auschwitz, Bhopal, Chernobyl, Seveso, Soweto, to Gulag, Nagasaki, wherever you come from. (He disappears the right, now hummingMarley's"Redemption Song.")

Is it possible that Ariel, or even Caliban of Shakespeare's The Tempest, could have addressed the audience and in such an irreverent way? Hardly. And yet, it is certainly imaginable that a new monologue could be written in a similar way. But new questions need to be asked: Who is the audience addressed in this manner? Why is Ariel leaving them? What is the nature of the show that was being played before this imaginary monologue? Such questions point to the fact that parameters in the dialogue between hegemon and subaltern have shifted and are subject to continuous paradigmatic shifts or-in Sylvia Wynter's terminology-epistemic change. Thus, as for example Stuart Hall has pointed out in his essay "New Ethnicities," there can be "no simple 'return' or 'recovery' of the ancestral past which is not re-experienced through the categories of the present" (2001, 448). Or, as Scott argues more abstractly, Ariel's new monologue could be understood as an invitation "to take up the more difficult task of thinking fundamentally against the normalization of the epistemological and institutional forms of our political modernity" (1999, 20). Few Caribbean writers have bothered much with Ariel. One of them, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, the cornucopian wordsmith from Barbados, has attempted to bring the ghost into the picture. In his article "Caliban, Ariel, and Unprospero in the Conflict of Creolization: A Study of the Slave Revolt in Jamaica in 1831-32," Brathwaite interprets the creolization process by utilizing Shakespeare's protagonists as archetypical actors in the colonial drama. Although he is aware of it, it would appear that his Ariel does not unfold the full ambivalence Shakespeare had applied to his persona. In Brathwaite's

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interpretation, Ariel, "usually an educated slave or freedman open to 'white' creolization and technology" (1977, 48), mainly acts as a go-between, an intermediary, a Hermes, delivering signals and orders from the colonial Fiihrerbunkerto the front lines of colonial sugar plantations in the Caribbean.22 In contrast to Brathwaite, I suggest that Ariel cannot be applied as an archetype that denotes a particular personality on the colonial stage. Rather, Ariel has to be "read" for what he really is, an ethereal force permeating the sky just around the heads of the colonial intruder but operating well below the radar of his/her sight/consciousness. I argue that Ariel is more appropriately understood as a metaphor for a set of practices in Caribbean everyday life. Who is Shakespeare's Ariel really? Isn't she or he a creature that has promised temporary service, but really only exists for the singleminded pursuit of his ultimate day of freedom?23 "Is there more toil? Since thou dost give me pains, / Let me remember thee what thou hast promis'd, / Which is not yet perform'd me" (1.2.242-44). There is nothing ambiguous about this demand. But Ariel knows realpolitik. Prospero is in possession of superior magic: "If thou murmur'st, I will rend an oak, / And peg thee in his knotty entrails, till / Thou hast howl'd away twelve winters" (1.2.294-96). The result follows a clear cost-benefit analysis:
ARIEL: Pardon, master:

I will be correspondent to command, And do my spiriting gently. PROSPERO: Do so; and after two days I will discharge thee. ARIEL: That's my noble master! What shall I do? say what; what shall I do? (1.2.297-300)

Ariel may be an ethereal force, but he is no dreamer. He is well aware of his limits. He temporarily allies himself with his antithesis in pursuit of the promise and ultimate goal. Indeed, where Caliban is deploring his fate, Ariel is taking action. Rather than Brathwaite's Ariel, the Ariel envisioned in this essay comes closer to Rodo's emphatic description written in 1900:
He is generous enthusiasm, elevated and unselfish motivation in all actions, spirituality in culture, vivacity and grace in intelligence. Ariel is

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the ideal toward which human selection ascends, the force that wields life's eternal chisel, effacing from aspiring mankind the clinging vestiges of Caliban, the play's symbol of brutal sensuality. (1988, 31)

Thus, Rodo's Ariel is more an invisible hand or an (elusive?) goal to be aspired to. While we acknowledge the positive spin given to Ariel in Rodo's essay, we also need to be mindful of the limits that the author imposed on this figure, which have been criticized by others such as Carlos Fuentes (in the foreword to the 1988 edition) and Roberto Fernandez Retamar (1988). His endorsement of Europeanin particular French-culture and complete neglect of American indigenous cultural contributions have to be noted as unfortunate shortcomings, even if we-as Fuentes does-attempt to understand it in the context of the essay's historical origins. Similarly (and perhaps yet closer to the central argument pursued here), as J. Michael Dash points out, a more positive reading of Shakespeare's Ariel has also been suggested by Cesaire. "In the voice of [Cesaire's] Ariel, the language of the land finds expression" (1986, 57). In Dash's view, Cesaire's Ariel is directed toward the transcendence of the revolt against Prospero:
His discourse is rooted in the belief that the imagination at its most intensive strives beyond moral, political, and sexual divisions for an androgynous wholeness. (56)

In Cesaire/Dash's interpretation, Ariel becomes a voice of (nonteleological) nature, of the landscape itself, which thus seems to become an additional protagonist of the discourse. Ariel, then, is the voice of a proto-ecological discourse.24 Yet, by virtue of his quasi-supernaturalistic appearance, Ariel seems to point to a higher order. The notion of ethereal force implies certain powers-powers that cannot be seen, operating subtly yet with determination, transmitting waves through the air that may on different occasions either gently direct or announce dread with a thunderous voice. Ariel, imprisoned by Sycorax "into a cloven pine; within which rift, / Imprison'd thou didst painfully remain," without doubt is a master of music in Shakespeare's play (1.2.277-79). Does it take too much imagination to see him akin to a skin stretched over a drum? Isn't his ghostly song really the transposed voice of Africa, the voice of the African-Caribbean? Isn't there

ARIEL'S ETHOS | 49

dreadful riddim in his song?: "Full fadom five thy father lies; / Of his bones are coral made; / Those are pearls that were his eyes" (1.2.399400). There is even clearer evidence that Ariel has Maroon character:
... Then I beat my tabor;

At which, like unback'd colts, they prick'd their ears, Advanc'd their eyelids, lifted up their noses, As they smelt music: so I charm'd their ears, That, calf-like, they my lowing follow'd ... (4.1.175-79)

If Ariel is not dubbing to a dub plate, his pied piper stage presence still conjures up the cosmology of African peoples. He is clearly not of the same flesh and blood as Prospero, Caliban, or Trinculo. Together with Prospero he both invokes and revokes a different time experience: "My charms I'll break, their senses I'll restore, / And they shall be themselves" (5.1.31-32; see also 3.3). As indicated above, Ariel's ghostly appearance also carries a morality of its own:
You are three men of sin, whom Destiny, Hath caus'd to belch up you; and on this island, Where man doth not inhabit,-you 'mongst men Being most unfit to live. I have made you mad. (3.3.53-58)

This morality is not only contained in Shakespeare's writing, but also innate in the invocation of African cosmology as it appears through the Ariel figure. Without doubt in the African cosmology and theologies, spirits and spiritual forces are in close contact with humans. They occupy a somewhat intermediary position between the realm of human existence and the Supreme Being. There is communication, indeed interaction, and the well-being of humans depends on their ability to please spiritual forces. As one prominent African theologian and philosopher has put it:
Spirits as a group have more power than men, just as in a physical sense the lions do. Yet, in some ways men are better off, and the right human specialists can manipulate or control the spirits as they wish. Men paradoxically may fear, or dread, the spirits and yet they can drive the same spirits away or use them to human advantage. (Mbiti 1999, 78)

This relationship not only seems to describe the Ariel-Prospero

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relationship, but also connotes a moral dimension that is significantly different from the Christian tradition where no intermediary forces allow the active manipulation of social relationships or communal well-being. Where Europeans encountered Ariel's African spirit world in the West Indies it may, indeed, have made them mad.

READING ARIEL BACKWARD So far I have utilized the Shakespearean play in a rather conventional way, i.e., to help interpret and reinterpret the Prospero-Ariel dynamic, the colonial encounter, and power relationships between Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. But more is possible-and required-in order for us to make the fullest use of the Bard's ambiguous dialogues (see also Forbes 2001, 56). I shall therefore turn around the mirror to see who indeed is the most beautiful around. It is Ariel's time to laugh and lead the conversation.
ARIEL: Now,

you're still here, bewitcher? Has'd somehow missed thy last boat home? Backrano longer, much smaller thy frame look'd now. The golden chain around your paunch is gone, can't stop my time no more. How doest thou feel this day without thy horsemen, bible, cannon, bare now and face to face with me alone? PROSPERO:Oh Ariel, my good spirit. Thy tone speak'd of mistrust, discontent even. Thou didst not doubt my commitment ever, to you, the fair isle we chose to share. Say I am right! Few moments in time I intended just to borrow, to help you, even now, brighten your days, ours. ARIEL: Hush up now, where is your style, the good taste you once pretended? Like sugar it appears to have dissolved to nothing, sweet vanity, foaming on your somersaulting lips. (Frowns)Quite unappetizing! Speaking of jumps and rolls; did mine eyes not glimpse last night one of your European companions, jumping on his toes' tips, quite obviously contrary to the drum 'n' bass's riddim? Quite a sight, I confess to you. And thou should'st tell the fool that, for the most part, he and his party have not gotten in their veins what some would call a polyrhythm. Not born to be a prodigy to music, the sweetest of all arts; remember,the waves of air are my domain. Quite obviously, my clumsy one, no Sly Dunbar, Max Roach, or Elvin Jones yet from your seed sprang forth.

Thus, or similar, the Bard might have felt compelled to write, had he been born in the West Indies-and black.

ARIEL'S ETHOS | 51

But perhaps no one has expressed the need to write back and the determination to reclaim the moral authority over the destiny of the Caribbean and its peoples more eloquently and forcefully than Monsieur Cesaire himself:
Therefore, comrade, you will hold as enemies-loftily, lucidly, consistently-not only sadistic governors and greedy bankers, not only prefects who torture and colonists who flog, not only corrupt, check-licking politicians and subservient judges, but likewise and for the same reason, venomous journalists, goitrous academics, wreathed in dollars and stupidity, ethnographers who go in for metaphysics, presumptuous Belgian theologians, chattering intellectuals born stinking out of the thigh of Nietzsche, the patemalists, the embracers, the corrupters, the backslappers, the lovers of exoticism, the dividers, the agrarian sociologists, the hoodwinkers, the hoaxers, the hot-air artists, the humbugs, and in general, all those who, performing their functions in the sordid division of labor for the defense of Westernbourgeois society, try in diverse ways and by infamous diversions to split up the forces of Progress-even if it means denying the very possibility of Progress-all of them tools of capitalism, all of them, open or secretly, supporters of plundering colonialism, all of them responsible, all hateful, all slave-traders, all henceforth answerable for the violence of revolutionary action. (2000, 54-55)

As Lewis Gordon has pointed out, "thinking through the periphery, the underside, the subaltern could as well be characterized as 'Caliban studies,' if we will, where the focus is study through which Prospero's language can be decentered" (2000, 3). And yet, writing back to Shakespeare, or reading Ariel backward, remains in some ways too much within the given confines of European discourse. The rhetorical tropes and figures basically remain the same, if mirrored in a somewhat renegade style.25 Ariel remains mired in an Enlightenment argument, which prima facie would appear to fit him well. However, his adeptness to a polyrhythmic ontology is merely a gesture since it stays tied to the logic and narrative flow of the colonizer. Although this allows for considerable leverage, it also tries to fight the battle on a turf that has already been occupied, defined, and therefore tainted. Enlightenment morality was class- and race-based, i.e., dependent on the existence/creation of an Other, and hence is unfit for application to Caribbean contexts or for the purpose of comprehensive liberation. However, let us not part with Ariel yet, for-as Henry has argued

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incisively-our engagement with the poeticist tradition in Caribbean thought is a necessary corrective to the predominance of the historicist school within it (2000, 257-60). Ariel now has to remove himself out of the bipolarity that has emerged, stand aside, and read the voices of both protagonists from the side, that is, by applying a different angle. It is time to shatter, not just turn, the mirror.

READING ARIEL SIDEWAYS If we can read Shakespeare backward, there must also be a way to read the text of The Tempestor some of the characters sideways. But what can that possibly mean, and how can we read sideways? Obviously, "reading backward" implied a certain critique of the original text. However, by doing so, the backward-read text runs the risk of becoming a new orthodoxy. "Reading sideways" then must presumably provide us with an interpretation that does not easily run the risk of transforming itself into such a fixed positionality or hegemonic interpretation. In fact, it has itself to exhibit transforming properties, i.e., it has to be open to interpretation while shedding light on the existing text and countertext. Thus, it has to be a sort of guiding light without actually being a beacon. In attempting to outline the contours of such a discourse, I hope that my application of Shakespearean characters against themselves, as well as against the ambiguous moral economy of Caribbean existence, may be a very modest attempt to contribute to Scott's much larger project of refusing "history its subjectivity, its constancy, its eternity; to think it otherwise than as the past's hold over the present, to interrupt its seemingly irrepressible succession, causality, its sovereign claim to determinacy" (1999, 105). For our effort of mapping the moral economy of Caribbean existence, this refusal would then translate into a text that equally questions hegemonic and counterhegemonic value-system discourses in the region. It would have to achieve this by steering clear of both universalism and cultural relativism. The question is: Can it be done and has it been done in the region? The second part of this question is easy to answer. There can be no doubt that many aspects of the ongoing creolization experience(s)

ARIEL'S ETHOS | 53

in the region show how the peoples of this region have both used and refused elements of both their "autochthonous" value coordinates and those imposed by the colonial project. If, as I believe it has, the imposed colonial moral economy-perpetuated in numerous differing ways in the postcolonial Caribbean-was a conscious attempt to confuse and corrupt the moral stage on which the colonial and postcolonial dramas were acted out, a reconfigured moral economy cannot be gained by choosing between African, Anglo-European, and-to a lesser extent-Indo-Asian values. Instead, the way forward appears to be in attempts to "normalize" a deeply creolized economy of emotions and values.26 In many instances the popular imagination in the region has moved in this direction, especially in the realms of magico-religious practices, for example, in Haitian vodou. Beauvoir-Dominique (1998), among others, describes the early rise of Freemason societies and the continuing widespread use of wizard spell books (grimoires)in Haiti. These "underground realms of being," as she calls it, are to my mind the most obvious attempts to create "order," a new order, out of reconfigured elements inherited from ancestral and acquired occult spaces of "we" (see also Hurbon 1995, 146-49):
Imagine fumes of sulfur, lashing of whips, echoing forth to present-day Petwo ritual. Following centuries of bricolage, the Creoles needed direction and synthesis: a shredding down to impose order through hierarchy and command. Radically new ritual arrangement guided them throughout their war, "under the obedience of Petwo" (sou lobedyans Petwo). (Beauvoir-Dominique 1998,162)

And yes, there are definite attempts to unlearn the bi- and tripolarities imposed on the people of the region. Some of these attempts go beyond the "simple" use of language, text, and spoken word, and make their statements in the realm of music and the creative arts (see also Forbes 2001, 66). Others-important for a "social science" analysis-stay dedicated to the use of words and language, but at the same time attempt to transcend the inherited materials and re-create an original language and discourse about Caribbean ethics/ethos. Foremost, in my mind, is the poetic work of Brathwaite who has developed, as Bobb puts it, "a style and form that transform the marginality of the past into a centralizing force" (1998, 46). The key word

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here is "transform." Brathwaite's writing style, indeed, has surpassed many conventions, and with the materials offered by history and contemporary affairs, his entire oeuvre is a re-creation of an authentic Caribbean voice, a re-indigenization and reoccupation of the moral and ethical space held by Caribbean indigenous and African peoples before the arrival of the colonialists. Thus, when he describes the view from the location where he lived in Jamaica, overlooking Kingston:
Kin

the gstonHarbour sea from Old Harbour,Spanish Town, Caymanas, right rou nd to Bull Bay,Pharoah S anders' sun-ship and vail ey-mist, the huge huge all day sky and the distan (t) sea-sky where Cuba an (d) Hispaniola would be, except that we are lookin south tho feelin 'north' (Brathwaite1999,124)

he does not simply depict a geographic, but attempts to characterize also the torn and fragmented historicity of the intellectual space inhabited by modem Caribbean woman/man. In fact, however, the authentic, organic voice of the Caribbean is evident in many different locations and efforts of artistic (re)creation. Can this be done on a larger, and more sustained scale, one that even infects the (academic) discourse about Caribbean existence? The answer to this question will depend-among other things-on the historical process and distribution of class power. The uneasy coexistence of different registers of existence in the region allows us, however, to take the Shakespearean markers and emblems and reorder them for the exploration of a mindscape that has dramatically altered from the time when he fantasized about the New World. The raw material is there. The seeds of a fundamental discursive displacement in the Caribbean exist at the margins of (official) society and will always represent a potential option indicating that the official moral economy in the region could and ought to be stacked in ways that

ARIEL'S ETHOS | 55

decenter legitimacy claims of universal, homogenous, privileged, monadic, and positivist markers and signifiers. The result, however, will not be another fixed point, a definite and defining narrative, but,
as Benitez-Rojo reminds us aptly, "the goal . . . lies always at an

unreachable point, at the edge of the infinite, there, in a space that shifts continually from the possible to the impossible" (1996, 182):
ARIEL: So,

could it be done? PROSPERO: you always asking me? Haven't I given all the wrong Why answers yet? Go find your own. Leave me out of this. ARIEL: Well, I take your word. This is the last you see of me. in Yeah, yeah. That's fine. PROSPERO, now seeminglywrapped deepthought: I don't have all your answers, why are you even asking me? (Suckinghis I himselfof something) do share your ... teeth;then,as if suddenlyreminding (Pauses)No, let's not start again. TRINCULO: Are you ready to leave already?You can't quit now. (Both just stareat him.) I mean, it's just not the time yet. ARIEL: Why dat? Is yo mumma tell yuh? Or de nex' one. What 'im name again? Aloysius Gossamer Longshoreman ... som't'ing som't'ing ...? TRINCULO: Just wait. It's not the right time yet. I'm PROSPERO: not going anywhere anyhow. I'm down with you. TRINCULO: as I say, this is not the right time yet. This is the age Well, where you go dot-com. But, you don't want to go down there, do you? ARIEL: Why not, ah feel ready long time, man. TRINCULO: Yeah,yeah, you feel ready long time and that old fart next to you doesn't even remember what time is. So, what are you telling me about long time? Time longer than rope. I say you have to wait. You wait, it'll be here soon enough. PROSPERO, protests: Hey, hey, hey; I remember why we're here. I brought here after all. (Fallingbackinto thoughtfulness/forgetfulness) wait, But you isn't it all over now? What are we waiting for? You didn't hear what I said, old man. I say you TRINCULO, with attitude: have to stick around. You have to wait for 2Dog. He'll question your answers, your doubts, and your questions. ARIEL, imitatinga Britishaccent: Well, then, why don't we all enjoy a cup of tea in the meantime? I have here the finest of the finest. A rather exquisite mixture imported from Ceylon-pardon me, Sri Lanka.

If waiting for 2Dog, hybridity, ambivalence, code-switching, irony, and moral dualities are a hallmark of Caribbean moral existence, the socioeconomic everyday realities on the ground also force themselves back into the foreground to prevent a pure poetics of Caribbean

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existence. This shift in perspective seems to be implied, for example, in George Lamming's work, particularly when he raises the issue of a sovereignty beyond the narrowly conceived political sovereignty of new Caribbean nations and invokes a notion of sovereignty conceived as "the capacity you have for choosingand making and remaking that self which you discover is you, is distinctly you" (2002, 147). Due to the immense technological capabilities of our times and because of the movement nature of Caribbean existence, our mythopoetic perspective of the Caribbean moral economy can and indeed has to turn back to a more positivist evaluation. Thus, using Lamming's shift as a starting point, the question may be posed where the Caribbean stands in regard to the current transformation of the humanist ethos. Although ethic and moral philosophy have for some time lagged behind the new developments in technology, we are currently in a transition that at its end may-whether we like it or not-even make the old humanistic moral economy obsolete.27 Since the dawn of human consciousness and certainly since the European Enlightenment, individuals could at best hope to be a sub-ject (i.e., attainment of independence under a preexisting and encompassing conceptual frame, such as God, human rights, and so on). Due to advances with the Human Genome Project, advances in cloning, and stem cell technology, new horizons are looming under which humanity has the possibility to move from being a subject to becoming a project. As far as I can see, the debate about ethical and moral questions emerging from these possibilities has been considerably more nuanced, philosophically rigorous, and intense in Europe than in the more pragmatic U.S. public.28 In the Caribbean, however, I do not yet see the emerging contours of the Caribbean perspective on these issues. In the past we have witnessed concern about young black girls in the region using skin bleaching substances, but what if U.S. companies were to offer genetic manipulation that would promise to achieve Michael Jackson-like or Jennifer Lopez-type features without the use of a scalpel? What would be the social implications for the region if there were doctors offering phenotypically black parents an affordable option to have their child become a "browning"flowing hair, straight elongated nose, thin lips, and all? Perhaps regional intellectuals and decision makers implicitly

ARIEL'S ETHOS | 57

believe that these issues can be avoided, since they may be able to code-switch through the new options that are evolving. And perhaps that might even work. But, as mentioned before, something else is also eroding; the (imperfect) fundamentals of humanism such as human dignity, inviolability of life, the integrity of the person, and so on are quite possibly fighting a lost battle against the overwhelming "tyranny of the possible" implicit in these new life-changing technologies. Like it or not, these humanist fundamentals have affected the Caribbean-a creation of European, African, and Asian cultures -to a great extent. If we are indeed on the verge of becoming our own project, how will the Caribbean elect to shape itself and its future? How will its moral economy evolve if humanism's lure is fading? If hitherto the Caribbean was a hybrid of Europe and Africa (and, to a lesser extent, parts of Asia and the Near East), what will be the long-term effects of the possible disappearance of the arguably most substantial influence, the European humanistic system? In whose image will the Caribbean create itself following these epochal changes? Will we witness a showdown between-to analogize with Aristotle's classification of knowledge-an Afro-/Indo-centric mythic poiesis (as the basis of a new thrust of Caribbean nationalisms) and a U.S.-inspired quick-buck praxis (i.e., globalization), while the Eurohumanistic rationalist theoriafalls by the wayside? Ariel will have to be on the move again and can no longer afford the same degree of "philosophical liming" as in the past.29

Notes
For their numerous comments that helped me to disentangle some of my ideas, I am grateful to John Bewaji, J. A. George Irish, Karl-Heinz Magister, Trevor Purcell,JenniferSparrow,Deborah Thomas, as well as two anonymous reviewers. They, however, are not to be blamed for the remaining mess. 1. In an earlier article I attempted to discuss Caribbean existence outside of the parameters of morality and without an involvement in the potentially treacherous discussions about binaries such as right and wrong, good and evil (Henke 1997). In Aristotle, ethosis the characterproduced by moral habits. Similarly, both the words "conscience" and "consciousness" derive from the Latin conscire (to know, be aware of; from con, with, together, plus scire, to know). Because Caribbeanmoral space(s) involve constant shifts and trade-offs, the term "economy" was introduced in this context.

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2. Important arguments along the same line have been suggested by important Caribbean writers such as Wilson Harris, Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, Derek Walcott, and others. In the following I will refer to some of this work. 3. By using the term "subaltern"I do not wish to invoke Spivak's misinterpreted essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" from which, in any case, she has distanced herself (see, e.g., Landry and McLean 1996). Rather, it is used in the Gramsciansense that Meeks (2000, 22-24) seems to propose. 4. This statement may be regarded as problematic and requiring some explanation. In my view, there does already exist a Caribbean cultural discourse that is largely embodied in the cultural practices, traditions, and everyday actions of Caribbean peoples. To my mind, Caribbean scholars have not yet sufficiently recognized and thematized these mostly performative and nonscriptural expressions of Caribbean thought. It is hoped this modest attempt at integrating them into scholarly work will achieve some of the still missing recognition. 5. Among the notable exceptions to this tendency are intellectuals such as Rex Nettleford, George Lamming, and Antonio Benitez-Rojo. 6. And for a moment we will overlook Cesaire's gendered concept of the rationalizing human being. 7. In his essay "Of Other Spaces," Foucault defines the term the following way: "There are probably in every culture, in every civilization, real placesplaces that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society-which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultacontested,and inverted.Places of this kind are outside of all neously represented, places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality.Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias" (1986, 27). 8. The situation here is similar to the dilemma of deconstructive thinking, described by GayatriSpivak: "Operatingnecessarily from the inside," she writes, "borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of subversion from the old structure,borrowing them structurally,that is to say, without being able to isolate their elements and atoms, the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work" (quoted in Landry and MacLean 1996, 7). 9. Thus, while in the Christian tradition current Jamaican moral values certainly are perceived as being ordained by God, traditionalAshanti beliefs hold that "God has no influence on people's moral values" (Mbiti 1999, 202). However, Ashanti was one of the main ethnic groups from which people were brought as slaves to Jamaica (Alleyne 1989, 44; Craton 1982, 125). The connection certainly needs a more systematic exploration, but the question arises whether Jamaica's current moral crisis does not also find an explanation in these competing perceptions of God's role in the determination of human moral values. 10. This is not to argue that rational thought does not play the same role in Caribbean discourse as it does for any other culture. My argument is simply

ARIEL'S ETHOS | 59

that Caribbeanthought is at different times and for different groups influenced by a variety of contending cosmologies, ontologies, and epistemologies. Any constructive in-depth and prolonged communication between these systems is likely to encounter implicit or explicit definitional boundaries at which point the discourse inherently tends toward a resolution in irony and humor. 11. Yet another important, and often underappreciated, strategy in the Caribbean context is the marginality suffered by nonconforming individualism and eccentricity or the more or less real escape of (post)colonial "madness." See, for example, Henke 1996, 69-71; and Price 1998, 157-217. 12. Despite several attempts to secure a copyright permission for the few lines that the original version of this article intended to quote from his song, Sparrow was not willing to produce this permission. The reader is therefore asked to read the lyrics of the song on-line, where it can be found reproduced at a variety of locations, e.g., at socanews.com/music/lyrics/melda(obeahwedding).shtml or at arts.yorku.ca/english/creet/ lyrics.html. 13. Cunumunuis a Trinidadian term for a stupid person. The word is also known in Jamaica(and possibly other Caribbeancountries) and is therefore probably of West African origin. In Sparrow's song, the term is pronounced with an "1"in place of the second "n"in cunumunu(koo-noo-mooloo). 14. Mbiti's claim that African society does not know "future"(1999, 16) has been proven wrong by a number of authors and subsequently intense debates have developed over the nature of the African concept of time. See, for example, Beyaraza 2000. 15. The notion of ascetic rationalism was, of course, introduced by Weber (1973, 380). Since Protestantasceticism is fundamentally opposed to the danger of a free and hedonistic enjoyment of wealth, the subversive power of liming is easily discernible. Despite the impression given by Weber, however, we also have to note that both privacy and the concomitant concept of individualism originated in the aristocraticclasses of feudal Europe. Only gradually, and with the triumph of capitalism, did these concepts become "public goods" in Europe. 16. Although Birth (1999, 130) mentions this aspect, his treatment of it does not get adequate coverage and is not sufficiently emphasized. 17. Exceptions support this general rule; in the case of Nevis, Abrahams (1968) mentions that "thereis very little community activity or feeling." 18. Other important instances of Caribbean communalism are child shifting, rotating savings and credit associations ("partner"or "susu"), family land, day-for-day labor, conviviality, and so on. 19. While community plays a strong role in Hinduism, there seems to be a stronger emphasis on individualism than in traditional African culture and philosophy (see Khan 1996, 6). Community in Hinduism, moreover, seems to transcend anthropocentrism and to suggest a communion with the universe, a less concrete and more abstract or transcendental form of community. 20. For the aspects of universality and particularity in East Indian communities in Trinidad,see Schwartz 1964.

HENKE 60 | HOLGER

(1999), Retamar's Calibany otros 21. See, for instance, Cesaire's A Tempest (1979), Toumson's TroisCalibans(1981), or the creative oeuvre of George ensayos Lamming, which centers on TheTempest. 22. It is important to note at this point that Brathwaite introduces what he calls the "Aerial"persona. Aerial functions in his argument as a kind of prototype Ariel, an Ariel who aspires to, but cannot achieve, becoming his full self. Only in exceptional cases and for exceptional individuals (e.g., Jamaica's national hero Sam Sharpe) was the successful entrance "into the Euro-creolizingor ac/culturative process" made possible (Brathwaite 1977, 59/60). Still, the relationship Ariel/Aerial is not applied consistently throughout Brathwaite's text. In his ConBrathwaitedescribes Ariel as "Prospero'sspying with NathanielMackey, versations eyes, his communication apparat, police and television aerials" (1999, 188). Ariel has a similarly (potentially) reactionaryrole in Retamar's (1988) interpretation. 23. This seems also to be the way Cesaire reads Ariel (see 1999, 20-23). 24. Edouard Glissant has consciously and brilliantly incorporated this aspect into his oeuvre. Consider, for example, Glissant's thoughts about the land: "Iam struck by the fate of flowers. The shapeless yielding to the shapely. As if the land had rejected its 'essence' to concentrate everything in appearance. It can be seen but not smelt. Also these thoughts on flowers are not a matter of lamenting a vanished idyll in the past. But it is true that the fragile and fragrant flower demanded in the past daily care from the community that acted on its own. The flower without fragranceendures today, is maintained in form only. Perhaps that is the emblem of our wait? We dream of what we will cultivate in the future, and we wonder vaguely what the new hybrid that is already being prepared for us will look like, since in any case we will not rediscover them as they were, the magnolias of former times" (1989,52). While in the context of the hybrid, ambiguous moral situation of the Caribbean the dream for the flower's fragrance becomes the dominant register of thought and action, the rampant materialism of much of the rest of the world appears to rush in a pseudoteleological frenzy from one invention to the next, from one record to the next, from growth to more growth, with inner and external peace of woman/man with herself and between woman/man and nature being as remote as ever before. While much of the Caribbean is certainly infected by the same bug, it nevertheless seems to run against its deep inner being. If Novalis's mythic Blue Flower was ever to be found, it would grow somewhere in the rainforest or along the seashores of the Caribbeanislands. 25. This is also an obvious concern of Scott. See, for example, his introducFutures(1999). tion to Refashioning 26. "Creole" and "creolization"are by no means clear and unambiguous concepts. Space considerations prevent a problematization of these terms, and I am using them here simply in order to point to the fundamentally hybrid, intermediary, and multilayered nature of Caribbean social systems. For a more comprehensive treatment, see Shepherd and Richards (2002), in particular the excellent chapters by Nigel Bolland and Carolyn Allen.

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27. The operative word here is "may."Obviously the debate about whether what is technologically possible shall also be what is morally allowed is currently in full swing. 28. I am thinking here in particular about a highly controversial speech in 1998 by the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk(his "ElmauLecture"),replies by Habermas, Robert Spaemann, and subsequent interventions by the GerJuiirgen man chancellor and Bundesprasident, among others (see also Jongen 2001). As far as I can see, the Sloterdijklecture is not yet available in English, at least not on the Internet; however, one source that includes debate about his ideas and more recent texts can be found at http://www.goethe.de/uk/los/symp/enindex.htm. 29. I am well aware that there are exciting new developments under way with regard to the development of a Caribbean philosophy, some of which were alluded to in this text.

WorksCited
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