Trickster at the African Crossroads and the Bridge to the Blues in America by Michelle Bitting
Bio:
Palisades Poet Laureate Michelle Bitting is a fourth generation Palisadian and mother of two. Married to actor Phil Abrams she has published extensively in national journals including The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Narrative, the L.A. Weekly, and others. Poems have appeared on Poetry Daily and as the Weekly Feature on Verse Daily. Her book Good Friday Kiss won the DeNovo First Book Award and Notes to the Beloved, won the 2011 Sacramento Poetry Center Award and received a starred Kirkus Review. Michelle has taught poetry in the U.C.L.A. Extension Writer’s Program, at Twin Towers prison with a grant from Poets & Writers Magazine and is an active California Poet in the Schools. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Pacific University, Oregon and recently commenced work on a PhD in Mythological Studies.She is pursuing her PhD at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Visit her at: www.michellebitting.com
Bio:
Palisades Poet Laureate Michelle Bitting is a fourth generation Palisadian and mother of two. Married to actor Phil Abrams she has published extensively in national journals including The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Narrative, the L.A. Weekly, and others. Poems have appeared on Poetry Daily and as the Weekly Feature on Verse Daily. Her book Good Friday Kiss won the DeNovo First Book Award and Notes to the Beloved, won the 2011 Sacramento Poetry Center Award and received a starred Kirkus Review. Michelle has taught poetry in the U.C.L.A. Extension Writer’s Program, at Twin Towers prison with a grant from Poets & Writers Magazine and is an active California Poet in the Schools. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Pacific University, Oregon and recently commenced work on a PhD in Mythological Studies.She is pursuing her PhD at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Visit her at: www.michellebitting.com
To even dare attempt a meditation on the trickster figure in African religions is a daunting task, given both the elusive nature of this character, described by scholar Robert Pelton as “radically ambiguous, essentially anomalous, inescapably multivalent” (258) but also because his presentation and characteristics vary across numerous African religions. As living mythology, his essence is wrapped in animate, ritual-bound, spiritual experience that defies reduction through language and interpretation, and yet, I would offer, is very much at the heart of arts that developed out of the African Diaspora. The trickster eludes the restriction of archetypal labeling and embodies a constantly “whirling mass of relationships” (10) that are paradoxical and unpredictable as well as highly creative in their interplay with daily life and passage to the mystical. “A figure of the margins but somehow at the center” (3), the trickster is especially fascinating. The ultimate coherence of his open-ended, controversial qualities, as well as the self-aware duality of folly and the tragic are felt in the underbelly of American Blues music and poetry. Specifically and for my purposes here, as it manifests in the work of Robert Johnson and current U.S. Poet-Laureate, Natasha Tretheway.
While it is impossible to categorically define the trickster figure, as he turns up throughout the world in myriad religious and literary settings, I’d like to explore some facets of this complex and intellectually provocative orisha and acknowledge his diverse manifestation in the Yoruba, Fon, Ashanti and Dogon traditions. Some of the terms used to describe him include: “Loutish, lustful, puffed up with boasts and lies, ravenous for foolery and food, yet always managing to draw order from ordure” (1); “deceiver, thief, parricide, cannibal, inventor, creator, benefactor, magician, perpetrator of obscene acts” (6), he moves between worlds and reflects symbolic patterns as opposed to a set archetype. This makes defining the trickster difficult even as it implies a vital and endless source of multiplicity and twists of fate. No wonder he captures the spirit and attention of so many singers (Bob Dylan suddenly springs to mind) and poem-makers! Truth sayer, web-spinner, cosmic never-do-well, he incites disorder even as he longs for Oneness. Associated with the spider in Ashanti and animals like the fox and coyote, trickster is the messenger and gatekeeper between the realms of gods and human, the one to be acknowledged before any act of divination. As Dr. Laura Grillo suggests, he may be defined as “a prototypical mythical figure characterized by rebelliousness, cunning, and deceit; A sewer of disorder who is nevertheless associated with the establishment of the world” (African Foundations). He is to be found at the sign of the crossroads, which we will see likely influences his placement in the American landscape in the form of blues singer, Robert Johnson. Again, the trickster-figure is a web of raw, paradoxical energies, interwoven and manifest in a complex weave of masks that are meant to be held intact and not broken down or reduced by interpretation. As Pelton says:
The problem, I am convinced, is one of language. The trickster speaks--and embodies--a vivid and subtle religious language, through which he links animality and ritual transformation, shapes culture by means of sex and laughter, ties cosmic process to personal history, empowers divination to change boundaries into horizons, and reveals the passages to the sacred embedded in daily life. (3)
Much has been written on the subject of the trickster-figure regarding both the subtle and more obvious elements of difference in his physical and spiritual roles across African religious practices. While many factors inform these attributes, including but not limited to: population density, longevity of practice and cultural sophistication--in general, it appears that the intricacy with which the trickster is woven into patterns of daily life is quite marvelous in its subtlety. “If we began by emphasizing the hermeneutic value of a pattern open to a broad range of symbolic expressions, it will not do to end in slavery to a tidy structure that satisfies our logic by denying the trickster’s” (223). In addition, while there may be similarities between the Eshu, Legba, and Ogo-Yurugu trickster figures, it becomes clear that to equate and confuse their manifestations and modes of operation within the Yoruba, Fon and Dogon cultures is as foolish as trying to define the trickster himself. Pelton elaborates:
We have just seen how Ogo-Yurugu embodies that amazing word of the world which discloses the personal and communal, human and divine movement of life in Dogon speech. Eshu, the cosmic iconographer, shatters every worn-out image of life so that the language of Ifa divination may call forth the sacrifice that brings once again into intimate conversation the world’s every part. Legba knows the words creative of intercourse, sexual and heavenly, ritual and economic, and everywhere his phallus stands as a symbol of muteness overcome and communion reestablished. (244)
For the purposes of eventually bridging a connection between the trickster roots in Africa to his role in diaspora music and poetry in North America, I’d like to magnify his appearance as Eshu/Legba in Yoruba and Fon religious life and notice how his characteristics might resonate dynamically in the persona of Robert Johnson and Natasha Tretheway’s verse. Because Eshu and Legba are often spoken about as one, it is worth noticing how they are, in fact, also very different and how these diversions further elaborate our trickster musician-poet figure in the diaspora. Pelton insists:
The similarity between Eshu and Legba is clear, but we must note carefully the Yoruba emphasis on Eshu’s vengefulness in contrast to the Fon insistence on Legba’s forgiveness. Both embody a pursuit of intercourse so relentless that it shatters every worn-out pattern to enlarge the space of human life. Both, therefore, are troublemakers, disturbers of the peace and disrupters of harmony, yet only Eshu is thought of as “the anger of the gods. (130)
It would seem that at the metaphysical heart of the trickster is the potential for dynamic chaos and this informs what’s enigmatic, complicated and essential about this figure. By unleashing new powers and possibilities and by inciting confusion, something novel may be imagined and birthed to break through old structures. Murkiness and ambiguity allow for multiplicity and greater freedom. It is not without serious prayer and devotion to ritual that these gods are called and employed as drastic change involves great risk. The fact that Eshu/Legba is responsible for both the tearing down as well as re-structuring of relationships, and not as a distant divine entity but in a fully embodied spirit here on earth, makes the dance all the more dazzling as divinity is dealt in the immanent. It would seem for the Haitians this is why the possession ritual is central to divination as it so totally fosters the marriage of the human and orisha in the most extreme sense. Pelton also emphasizes Eshu’s importance in breaking down old orders for the purpose of restructuring and forging new connections, and as described above, there is the more vengeful, aggressive nature in Eshu as opposed to Legba’s highly sexual, reconciliatory one. In this respect, they represent both dynamics of the death and procreative cycle. What I find fascinating and terribly crucial in terms of relevance to diaspora blues song and poetry is the pervasively physical living and playing out of these divine twists and turns. Art is metaphor is artifice and while it connects the human and the divine it is about the transformation of the muck and daily intercourse of life on earth. As Pelton states, this god "finds in all biological, social, and metaphysical walls doorways into a larger universe" (119). While I do not propose to equate trickster with a myth-maker identity as my sense is that his all-pervasiveness and irreducible quality extend beyond the limits of typology, I would still suggest that in relation to identity with the human, we can, without fault, speak of him in the context of creator, artist, poet and maker. Just as the artist (and we certainly witness this in the person of Robert Johnson) is a breaker and maker of rules, a surfer of the chaotic, cosmic, silver & mercury strata of the universe, called to the disruptive cadences of life’s drumming to incite disorder in service of creating a new vision, the trickster moves between worlds “both as social enterprise and as divine gift” (4). Pelton continues:
The trickster depicts man as a sort of inspired handyman, tacking together the bits and pieces of experience until they become what they are--a web of many-layered being. In symbolizing the transforming power of the imagination as it pokes at, plays with, delights in, and shatters what seems to be until it becomes what is, he discloses how the human mind and heart are themselves epiphanies of a calmly transcendent sacredness so boldly engaged with this world that it encompasses both nobility and messiness--feces, lies, and even death. (4)
What links us to the trickster, then, is our humanness, those places in us destined for the liberated zones of fate--dimensions of freedom in creativity--at once risky and often exhilarating. The trickster plays on our humanness while testing our divinity, crossing the boundaries of conventional sexual and political practices, demanding room for the artist to step forth and speak the truth. The trickster tradition embraces the kaleidoscopic human experience and acknowledges our outrageous desires, our weaknesses and strengths within a matrix of contradiction but that, all-told, make us who we are. The obvious correlation would be to the Fool persona, so prevalent in art and literature across cultures and centuries. Perhaps it is the finite nature of our existence, fraught with much suffering and despair, that necessitates an ability to step outside experience and have a good laugh at our own expense. As Nietzsche says:
“And precisely because we are at bottom grave and serious human beings, nothing does us as much good as the fool’s cap: we need it against ourselves--we need all exuberant, floating, dancing, mocking, childish and blissful art lest we lose that freedom over things that our ideal demands of us” (Williams 263).
It is just these fluid, mercurial qualities clearly associated with the trickster that make the leap across oceans to America and are carried forth in the development of the blues persona and songs of black musicians post-Civil War and beyond. Blues music appears to have come together as “an amalgamation that coalesced in some unknown black musician in the Southern United States, somewhere in the late 1800’s, when he or she put together the basic twelve-bar blues progression” (244). In his book The Trickster Brain: Neuroscience, Evolution and Narrative, David Williams goes on to describe the convergence of musical influences out of which the Blues phenomenon was born:
In the blues you can hear the poly-rhythms of African music, the call and response structure from African village life, the strain of Negro spirituals (themselves a combination of African harmonies, rhythms and European musical scales and hymns), the story-telling tradition of Scotch-Irish ballads, work songs and something of the Trickster-inspired tales of Africa (of which Bre’r Rabbit and John are both legacies). (244)
Because segregation and Jim Crow attitudes continued to prevail even after the abolishment of slavery, the blues trickster was able to flourish and develop musically outside the boundaries of puritanical America. Heavy with the lyricism of love and sex, blues was often associated with the devil’s music and divided the morally stringent in both black and white communities. Nevertheless, its popularity grew on both sides of the divide as the blues musician, so often like his (or her) trickster twin, wandered the roads of America in search of love, sex, trouble, mayhem and beauty--the whole truth and nothing but the truth, cloaked in a lie--the myth, the song: “Unlike the tepid and romanticized popular music of white America, the blues exposed the rough and tumble rawness of relationships that took place in a less than ideal world. For even though slavery was over, which allowed the blues to develop and spread, America was still for most black people a terrorist state, where Jim Crow ruled” (244).
Such “rough and tumble awareness” characteristic of the blues was supremely manifest in the stylings of trickster-chanteuses like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith who pushed the limits of bold sexuality and truth-telling to the most outrageously magnificent limits. Not only that, the subject matter of their music centered around everyday concerns of the body, employment woes, traveling, marital woes, drinking--in short--real-life, visceral human matters. True to the trickster, these ladies enthralled the female and male sexes alike, and were said to have enjoyed physical pleasure amongst both genders. Politically and socially audacious, in her song “Preachin’ the Blues,” Bessie Smith “tackles her religious critics head on by suggesting quite clearly that the sexuality she sang of was also full of spiritual verve” (250). Williams adds: “It was actually the blues women stars of the late minstrel shows who pioneered the classical blues tradition around the turn of the century as the shows transitioned to something new” (247). The tension of being black in a white-dominant world and therefore forced outside and into an itinerant lifestyle, the dialectic held within the subject matter itself: love-rejection, pain-pleasure, success-failure, suffering-relief, “should I stay or should I go?”--fueled the potency and multiplicity, if not the majesty, of the music in much the same way the trickster expands his power within the human imagination:
The principal theme of country blues and probably all blues, is the sexual relationship. Almost all other themes: leaving town, train rides, work trouble, general dissatisfaction, sooner or later reverts to the central concern. Most frequently the core relationship is seen as inherently unstable, transient, but with infinite scope for pleasure, and exultation in success or pain and torment in failure. This gives the blues its tension and ambiguity, dealing simultaneously with togetherness and loneliness, communion and isolation, physical joy and emotional anguish. (Oakley 91)
This simultaneous tension and ambiguity is what I turn to address now as it so perfectly reflects the trickster essence and persona of Robert Johnson, and specifically, for my investigation here, as expressed in his famous blues piece “Love in Vain.” While information about Johnson can be difficult to track, he is generally thought to have been brilliant as a blues guitarist, performer and songwriter--an enigmatic, unpredictable wanderer with a genius for engaging his audiences as well as female love interests. Of course, these attributes all jibe with the trickster persona, along with Johnson’s legendary sale of his soul to the devil in return for extraordinary musical talent, said to have taken place at a Mississippi crossroads, the crossroads being the traditional meeting place with the African trickster Legba for the purpose of ritual exchange--something precious swapped for something magical, divine and wise. While the interpretation of this legendary swap is often bathed in a negative, demonic light, David Williams insists that, regarding both Robert and Tommy Johnson: “the devil that both Johnsons sold their soul to was the “devil” of the brain itself, in which language, music, and sexuality are all rolled into a related stream of neuro connections that are the result of millions of years of evolution the trickster persona gives life to” (254).
I wouldn’t know how to begin to define what Williams deems the devil brain of music, language and sexuality, for it is here that I’d be swimming (or rather flailing) in mysterious, potent waters that can never be contained and perhaps have something to do with what makes the trickster operate in a pulsing, paradoxical realm that bridges the underworld, the earthly, and the cosmically divine. So I won’t bother trying. I will say that I can press a bit further into the contradictory or ironic nature, the dynamic tension of opposites we’ve seen at work in the trickster and, similarly, in great works of art and breathtaking blues. In his song “Love in Vain, ” Johnson sings:
When the train left the station, it had two lights on behind
Yeah, the train left the station, it had two lights on behind
Yeah, the train left the station, it had two lights on behind
Well, the blue light was my baby and the red light was my mind
In the first part of the song, before this final stanza, we understand that the speaker follows his woman “to the station with a suitcase in (his) hand,” giving the impression that he plans to go with her. Of course, we know the song concerns “love in vain” and this, coupled with the mournful longing of the tune, implies contradictory sentiments from the get-go. In the next stanza he pulls the listener into intimate disclosure: “I looked her in the eye, I looked her in the eye. I felt so sad and lonely, I could not help but cry.” Now we have an inkling of the imminent tragedy following the line “I looked her in the eye” that he repeats in traditional blues form, a nod to the repetition in African ritual song of call and response. And we know that in spite of all the love and longing and desire to be with his baby, it is likely not to be so. Jump to the train pulling out of the station and Johnson’s spare description of the two tail lights: blue for his baby and red for his mind. The associations with the color blue we could make could fill a book. Blues is the love gone wrong and the fading farther into the distance of time and memory that have no limit. And red, well red is the self is the devil is the heat is the engine is trouble is fire is the stop that makes art go. It’s all here in this simple but terribly powerful blues piece that is endlessly sung and re-envisioned by trickster rock and rollers since the time Johnson master-crafted it.
Going with the train motif that is so wonderfully bound up in the blues trickster-as-wanderer and railway traveler, and building on Johnson’s classic tune, I turn now to current U.S. Poet Laureate and Mississippi native Natasha Tretheway’s fabulous poem “At the Station.” Here it is in its entirety:
AT THE STATION
The blue light was my blues,
and the red light was my mind.
~ Robert Johnson
The man, turning, moves away
from the platform. Growing smaller,
he does not say.
Come back. She won’t. Each
glowing light dims
the farther it moves from reach,
the train pulling clean
out of the station. The woman sits
facing where she’s been.
She’s chosen her place with care--
each window another eye, another
way of seeing what’s back there:
heavy blossoms in afternoon rain
spilling scent and glistening sex.
Everything dripping green.
Blue shade, leaves swollen like desire.
A man motioning nothing.
No words. His mind on fire.
In this poem, Tretheway uses a phrase from Johnson’s piece as epigraph with the slight change of “blues” for “baby.” Historically, both versions of either word have been used by various artists. Regardless, the hot conflict held within the word “blues,” and by extension, the singer’s feeling about his lover “baby” is the paradox of an overwhelming feeling of desire and loss, that within the depths of despair there remains the ultimate triumph of being able to laugh at oneself and even sing about it. Again, this points to emotional dialectics identified with the trickster as well as the simultaneous existence of interior feeling and outward awareness of that inside state. Inherent in the Blues is personal expression and public opportunity to protest inhumanity in its focus on human emotions. In the introduction to his wonderful book Blues Poems, Kevin Young includes thoughts on the subject from writer Ralph Ellison who says:
The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a painful experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and then transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically. (Young 12)
Tretheway’s poem describes the “scene of the crime,” of the lover’s anguished leave-taking with prose and prosody missing from the original song itself; consequently, we get a fuller and more realistic sense of the dramatic moment played out closer to “real time.” Still, there are the lyric spaces, the leaps, that allow for questions and more importantly, the imagination to work. In her poem, it’s less clear who’s leaving whom; both lovers seem to be torn in two directions and both lean into the erotic. The woman sees “the afternoon rain/spilling scent and glistening sex” and the man has a “mind on fire.” A tension of mystery and ambiguity in the dramatic human situation amplifies the grandness of the poem, increasing its effect on the reader, just as the blues impetus in Robert Johnson fueled the impulse to step outside interior conflict and engage in the creative act of song-making. In a similar way, the trickster-figure may be said to reflect the inborn nature of the human mind as well as everything animal, cosmic and divine outside it. In short, the essence of the trickster image swells beyond fixed archetype and is, as Robert Pelton describes it: “the world experienced as an active subject” (257). He then imagines that experience to be “active” and “reciprocal,” to which I would add “endlessly, potentially, creative and destructive, both the experience itself and the entity, in this case, the trickster-figure in whom we perceive it: “It is the experience of the human mind in its imaginative operation as itself radically ambiguous, essentially anomalous, inescapably multivalent--facing both out and in, linking above and below, animal-like and godlike, social cog and individual solitude, shaped and shaping, part of all that is but only as a subject knowing its own apartness” (258).
To my mind, this is what makes the trickster, the blues and great poetry exhilarating, confounding, supremely marvelous, divine, and at the end of the dog gone day, so very human.
Works Cited:
Grillo, Laura. “African Foundations.” Pacifica Graduate Institute, Carpinteria, California. October, 2013.
Hogan, P.C. The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Tretheway, Natasha. Domestic Work. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2000.
Westcott, Joan. “The Sculpture and Myths of Eshu--Elegba, The Yoruba Trickster.” Africa 32, 1962. p. 345.
Williams, David. The Trickster Brain: Neuroscience, Evolution, and Narrative. Lanham:
Lexington Books, 2012.
Young, Kevin. Blues Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.
While it is impossible to categorically define the trickster figure, as he turns up throughout the world in myriad religious and literary settings, I’d like to explore some facets of this complex and intellectually provocative orisha and acknowledge his diverse manifestation in the Yoruba, Fon, Ashanti and Dogon traditions. Some of the terms used to describe him include: “Loutish, lustful, puffed up with boasts and lies, ravenous for foolery and food, yet always managing to draw order from ordure” (1); “deceiver, thief, parricide, cannibal, inventor, creator, benefactor, magician, perpetrator of obscene acts” (6), he moves between worlds and reflects symbolic patterns as opposed to a set archetype. This makes defining the trickster difficult even as it implies a vital and endless source of multiplicity and twists of fate. No wonder he captures the spirit and attention of so many singers (Bob Dylan suddenly springs to mind) and poem-makers! Truth sayer, web-spinner, cosmic never-do-well, he incites disorder even as he longs for Oneness. Associated with the spider in Ashanti and animals like the fox and coyote, trickster is the messenger and gatekeeper between the realms of gods and human, the one to be acknowledged before any act of divination. As Dr. Laura Grillo suggests, he may be defined as “a prototypical mythical figure characterized by rebelliousness, cunning, and deceit; A sewer of disorder who is nevertheless associated with the establishment of the world” (African Foundations). He is to be found at the sign of the crossroads, which we will see likely influences his placement in the American landscape in the form of blues singer, Robert Johnson. Again, the trickster-figure is a web of raw, paradoxical energies, interwoven and manifest in a complex weave of masks that are meant to be held intact and not broken down or reduced by interpretation. As Pelton says:
The problem, I am convinced, is one of language. The trickster speaks--and embodies--a vivid and subtle religious language, through which he links animality and ritual transformation, shapes culture by means of sex and laughter, ties cosmic process to personal history, empowers divination to change boundaries into horizons, and reveals the passages to the sacred embedded in daily life. (3)
Much has been written on the subject of the trickster-figure regarding both the subtle and more obvious elements of difference in his physical and spiritual roles across African religious practices. While many factors inform these attributes, including but not limited to: population density, longevity of practice and cultural sophistication--in general, it appears that the intricacy with which the trickster is woven into patterns of daily life is quite marvelous in its subtlety. “If we began by emphasizing the hermeneutic value of a pattern open to a broad range of symbolic expressions, it will not do to end in slavery to a tidy structure that satisfies our logic by denying the trickster’s” (223). In addition, while there may be similarities between the Eshu, Legba, and Ogo-Yurugu trickster figures, it becomes clear that to equate and confuse their manifestations and modes of operation within the Yoruba, Fon and Dogon cultures is as foolish as trying to define the trickster himself. Pelton elaborates:
We have just seen how Ogo-Yurugu embodies that amazing word of the world which discloses the personal and communal, human and divine movement of life in Dogon speech. Eshu, the cosmic iconographer, shatters every worn-out image of life so that the language of Ifa divination may call forth the sacrifice that brings once again into intimate conversation the world’s every part. Legba knows the words creative of intercourse, sexual and heavenly, ritual and economic, and everywhere his phallus stands as a symbol of muteness overcome and communion reestablished. (244)
For the purposes of eventually bridging a connection between the trickster roots in Africa to his role in diaspora music and poetry in North America, I’d like to magnify his appearance as Eshu/Legba in Yoruba and Fon religious life and notice how his characteristics might resonate dynamically in the persona of Robert Johnson and Natasha Tretheway’s verse. Because Eshu and Legba are often spoken about as one, it is worth noticing how they are, in fact, also very different and how these diversions further elaborate our trickster musician-poet figure in the diaspora. Pelton insists:
The similarity between Eshu and Legba is clear, but we must note carefully the Yoruba emphasis on Eshu’s vengefulness in contrast to the Fon insistence on Legba’s forgiveness. Both embody a pursuit of intercourse so relentless that it shatters every worn-out pattern to enlarge the space of human life. Both, therefore, are troublemakers, disturbers of the peace and disrupters of harmony, yet only Eshu is thought of as “the anger of the gods. (130)
It would seem that at the metaphysical heart of the trickster is the potential for dynamic chaos and this informs what’s enigmatic, complicated and essential about this figure. By unleashing new powers and possibilities and by inciting confusion, something novel may be imagined and birthed to break through old structures. Murkiness and ambiguity allow for multiplicity and greater freedom. It is not without serious prayer and devotion to ritual that these gods are called and employed as drastic change involves great risk. The fact that Eshu/Legba is responsible for both the tearing down as well as re-structuring of relationships, and not as a distant divine entity but in a fully embodied spirit here on earth, makes the dance all the more dazzling as divinity is dealt in the immanent. It would seem for the Haitians this is why the possession ritual is central to divination as it so totally fosters the marriage of the human and orisha in the most extreme sense. Pelton also emphasizes Eshu’s importance in breaking down old orders for the purpose of restructuring and forging new connections, and as described above, there is the more vengeful, aggressive nature in Eshu as opposed to Legba’s highly sexual, reconciliatory one. In this respect, they represent both dynamics of the death and procreative cycle. What I find fascinating and terribly crucial in terms of relevance to diaspora blues song and poetry is the pervasively physical living and playing out of these divine twists and turns. Art is metaphor is artifice and while it connects the human and the divine it is about the transformation of the muck and daily intercourse of life on earth. As Pelton states, this god "finds in all biological, social, and metaphysical walls doorways into a larger universe" (119). While I do not propose to equate trickster with a myth-maker identity as my sense is that his all-pervasiveness and irreducible quality extend beyond the limits of typology, I would still suggest that in relation to identity with the human, we can, without fault, speak of him in the context of creator, artist, poet and maker. Just as the artist (and we certainly witness this in the person of Robert Johnson) is a breaker and maker of rules, a surfer of the chaotic, cosmic, silver & mercury strata of the universe, called to the disruptive cadences of life’s drumming to incite disorder in service of creating a new vision, the trickster moves between worlds “both as social enterprise and as divine gift” (4). Pelton continues:
The trickster depicts man as a sort of inspired handyman, tacking together the bits and pieces of experience until they become what they are--a web of many-layered being. In symbolizing the transforming power of the imagination as it pokes at, plays with, delights in, and shatters what seems to be until it becomes what is, he discloses how the human mind and heart are themselves epiphanies of a calmly transcendent sacredness so boldly engaged with this world that it encompasses both nobility and messiness--feces, lies, and even death. (4)
What links us to the trickster, then, is our humanness, those places in us destined for the liberated zones of fate--dimensions of freedom in creativity--at once risky and often exhilarating. The trickster plays on our humanness while testing our divinity, crossing the boundaries of conventional sexual and political practices, demanding room for the artist to step forth and speak the truth. The trickster tradition embraces the kaleidoscopic human experience and acknowledges our outrageous desires, our weaknesses and strengths within a matrix of contradiction but that, all-told, make us who we are. The obvious correlation would be to the Fool persona, so prevalent in art and literature across cultures and centuries. Perhaps it is the finite nature of our existence, fraught with much suffering and despair, that necessitates an ability to step outside experience and have a good laugh at our own expense. As Nietzsche says:
“And precisely because we are at bottom grave and serious human beings, nothing does us as much good as the fool’s cap: we need it against ourselves--we need all exuberant, floating, dancing, mocking, childish and blissful art lest we lose that freedom over things that our ideal demands of us” (Williams 263).
It is just these fluid, mercurial qualities clearly associated with the trickster that make the leap across oceans to America and are carried forth in the development of the blues persona and songs of black musicians post-Civil War and beyond. Blues music appears to have come together as “an amalgamation that coalesced in some unknown black musician in the Southern United States, somewhere in the late 1800’s, when he or she put together the basic twelve-bar blues progression” (244). In his book The Trickster Brain: Neuroscience, Evolution and Narrative, David Williams goes on to describe the convergence of musical influences out of which the Blues phenomenon was born:
In the blues you can hear the poly-rhythms of African music, the call and response structure from African village life, the strain of Negro spirituals (themselves a combination of African harmonies, rhythms and European musical scales and hymns), the story-telling tradition of Scotch-Irish ballads, work songs and something of the Trickster-inspired tales of Africa (of which Bre’r Rabbit and John are both legacies). (244)
Because segregation and Jim Crow attitudes continued to prevail even after the abolishment of slavery, the blues trickster was able to flourish and develop musically outside the boundaries of puritanical America. Heavy with the lyricism of love and sex, blues was often associated with the devil’s music and divided the morally stringent in both black and white communities. Nevertheless, its popularity grew on both sides of the divide as the blues musician, so often like his (or her) trickster twin, wandered the roads of America in search of love, sex, trouble, mayhem and beauty--the whole truth and nothing but the truth, cloaked in a lie--the myth, the song: “Unlike the tepid and romanticized popular music of white America, the blues exposed the rough and tumble rawness of relationships that took place in a less than ideal world. For even though slavery was over, which allowed the blues to develop and spread, America was still for most black people a terrorist state, where Jim Crow ruled” (244).
Such “rough and tumble awareness” characteristic of the blues was supremely manifest in the stylings of trickster-chanteuses like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith who pushed the limits of bold sexuality and truth-telling to the most outrageously magnificent limits. Not only that, the subject matter of their music centered around everyday concerns of the body, employment woes, traveling, marital woes, drinking--in short--real-life, visceral human matters. True to the trickster, these ladies enthralled the female and male sexes alike, and were said to have enjoyed physical pleasure amongst both genders. Politically and socially audacious, in her song “Preachin’ the Blues,” Bessie Smith “tackles her religious critics head on by suggesting quite clearly that the sexuality she sang of was also full of spiritual verve” (250). Williams adds: “It was actually the blues women stars of the late minstrel shows who pioneered the classical blues tradition around the turn of the century as the shows transitioned to something new” (247). The tension of being black in a white-dominant world and therefore forced outside and into an itinerant lifestyle, the dialectic held within the subject matter itself: love-rejection, pain-pleasure, success-failure, suffering-relief, “should I stay or should I go?”--fueled the potency and multiplicity, if not the majesty, of the music in much the same way the trickster expands his power within the human imagination:
The principal theme of country blues and probably all blues, is the sexual relationship. Almost all other themes: leaving town, train rides, work trouble, general dissatisfaction, sooner or later reverts to the central concern. Most frequently the core relationship is seen as inherently unstable, transient, but with infinite scope for pleasure, and exultation in success or pain and torment in failure. This gives the blues its tension and ambiguity, dealing simultaneously with togetherness and loneliness, communion and isolation, physical joy and emotional anguish. (Oakley 91)
This simultaneous tension and ambiguity is what I turn to address now as it so perfectly reflects the trickster essence and persona of Robert Johnson, and specifically, for my investigation here, as expressed in his famous blues piece “Love in Vain.” While information about Johnson can be difficult to track, he is generally thought to have been brilliant as a blues guitarist, performer and songwriter--an enigmatic, unpredictable wanderer with a genius for engaging his audiences as well as female love interests. Of course, these attributes all jibe with the trickster persona, along with Johnson’s legendary sale of his soul to the devil in return for extraordinary musical talent, said to have taken place at a Mississippi crossroads, the crossroads being the traditional meeting place with the African trickster Legba for the purpose of ritual exchange--something precious swapped for something magical, divine and wise. While the interpretation of this legendary swap is often bathed in a negative, demonic light, David Williams insists that, regarding both Robert and Tommy Johnson: “the devil that both Johnsons sold their soul to was the “devil” of the brain itself, in which language, music, and sexuality are all rolled into a related stream of neuro connections that are the result of millions of years of evolution the trickster persona gives life to” (254).
I wouldn’t know how to begin to define what Williams deems the devil brain of music, language and sexuality, for it is here that I’d be swimming (or rather flailing) in mysterious, potent waters that can never be contained and perhaps have something to do with what makes the trickster operate in a pulsing, paradoxical realm that bridges the underworld, the earthly, and the cosmically divine. So I won’t bother trying. I will say that I can press a bit further into the contradictory or ironic nature, the dynamic tension of opposites we’ve seen at work in the trickster and, similarly, in great works of art and breathtaking blues. In his song “Love in Vain, ” Johnson sings:
When the train left the station, it had two lights on behind
Yeah, the train left the station, it had two lights on behind
Yeah, the train left the station, it had two lights on behind
Well, the blue light was my baby and the red light was my mind
In the first part of the song, before this final stanza, we understand that the speaker follows his woman “to the station with a suitcase in (his) hand,” giving the impression that he plans to go with her. Of course, we know the song concerns “love in vain” and this, coupled with the mournful longing of the tune, implies contradictory sentiments from the get-go. In the next stanza he pulls the listener into intimate disclosure: “I looked her in the eye, I looked her in the eye. I felt so sad and lonely, I could not help but cry.” Now we have an inkling of the imminent tragedy following the line “I looked her in the eye” that he repeats in traditional blues form, a nod to the repetition in African ritual song of call and response. And we know that in spite of all the love and longing and desire to be with his baby, it is likely not to be so. Jump to the train pulling out of the station and Johnson’s spare description of the two tail lights: blue for his baby and red for his mind. The associations with the color blue we could make could fill a book. Blues is the love gone wrong and the fading farther into the distance of time and memory that have no limit. And red, well red is the self is the devil is the heat is the engine is trouble is fire is the stop that makes art go. It’s all here in this simple but terribly powerful blues piece that is endlessly sung and re-envisioned by trickster rock and rollers since the time Johnson master-crafted it.
Going with the train motif that is so wonderfully bound up in the blues trickster-as-wanderer and railway traveler, and building on Johnson’s classic tune, I turn now to current U.S. Poet Laureate and Mississippi native Natasha Tretheway’s fabulous poem “At the Station.” Here it is in its entirety:
AT THE STATION
The blue light was my blues,
and the red light was my mind.
~ Robert Johnson
The man, turning, moves away
from the platform. Growing smaller,
he does not say.
Come back. She won’t. Each
glowing light dims
the farther it moves from reach,
the train pulling clean
out of the station. The woman sits
facing where she’s been.
She’s chosen her place with care--
each window another eye, another
way of seeing what’s back there:
heavy blossoms in afternoon rain
spilling scent and glistening sex.
Everything dripping green.
Blue shade, leaves swollen like desire.
A man motioning nothing.
No words. His mind on fire.
In this poem, Tretheway uses a phrase from Johnson’s piece as epigraph with the slight change of “blues” for “baby.” Historically, both versions of either word have been used by various artists. Regardless, the hot conflict held within the word “blues,” and by extension, the singer’s feeling about his lover “baby” is the paradox of an overwhelming feeling of desire and loss, that within the depths of despair there remains the ultimate triumph of being able to laugh at oneself and even sing about it. Again, this points to emotional dialectics identified with the trickster as well as the simultaneous existence of interior feeling and outward awareness of that inside state. Inherent in the Blues is personal expression and public opportunity to protest inhumanity in its focus on human emotions. In the introduction to his wonderful book Blues Poems, Kevin Young includes thoughts on the subject from writer Ralph Ellison who says:
The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a painful experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and then transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically. (Young 12)
Tretheway’s poem describes the “scene of the crime,” of the lover’s anguished leave-taking with prose and prosody missing from the original song itself; consequently, we get a fuller and more realistic sense of the dramatic moment played out closer to “real time.” Still, there are the lyric spaces, the leaps, that allow for questions and more importantly, the imagination to work. In her poem, it’s less clear who’s leaving whom; both lovers seem to be torn in two directions and both lean into the erotic. The woman sees “the afternoon rain/spilling scent and glistening sex” and the man has a “mind on fire.” A tension of mystery and ambiguity in the dramatic human situation amplifies the grandness of the poem, increasing its effect on the reader, just as the blues impetus in Robert Johnson fueled the impulse to step outside interior conflict and engage in the creative act of song-making. In a similar way, the trickster-figure may be said to reflect the inborn nature of the human mind as well as everything animal, cosmic and divine outside it. In short, the essence of the trickster image swells beyond fixed archetype and is, as Robert Pelton describes it: “the world experienced as an active subject” (257). He then imagines that experience to be “active” and “reciprocal,” to which I would add “endlessly, potentially, creative and destructive, both the experience itself and the entity, in this case, the trickster-figure in whom we perceive it: “It is the experience of the human mind in its imaginative operation as itself radically ambiguous, essentially anomalous, inescapably multivalent--facing both out and in, linking above and below, animal-like and godlike, social cog and individual solitude, shaped and shaping, part of all that is but only as a subject knowing its own apartness” (258).
To my mind, this is what makes the trickster, the blues and great poetry exhilarating, confounding, supremely marvelous, divine, and at the end of the dog gone day, so very human.
Works Cited:
Grillo, Laura. “African Foundations.” Pacifica Graduate Institute, Carpinteria, California. October, 2013.
Hogan, P.C. The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Tretheway, Natasha. Domestic Work. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2000.
Westcott, Joan. “The Sculpture and Myths of Eshu--Elegba, The Yoruba Trickster.” Africa 32, 1962. p. 345.
Williams, David. The Trickster Brain: Neuroscience, Evolution, and Narrative. Lanham:
Lexington Books, 2012.
Young, Kevin. Blues Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.
