Women, Gender, and Families of Color

The Dancehall Sphere

In the beginning of the 1950s, Jamaican dance halls were public spaces where sound systems were hired to entertain local community members in the rural areas of the island. Many scholars connect the emergence of dance halls with Jamaican funerary ceremonies such as Nine Night or Dead Yard (Delgado de Torres 2015; Stolzoff 2000). These funerary traditions are practiced throughout the Caribbean and take the form of an extended wake where community members gather at the home of the deceased over a period of several days, culminating in a celebratory final event with dancing and music. These events incorporate many recognizable West African traditions of honoring the deceased.

In Wake the Town and Tell the People, Nicholas Stolzoff (2000, 45) quotes soundman Winston Blake’s memory of Nine Night as an important social [End Page 169] occasion in rural Jamaica in the 1940s. During their conversation, Blake reminisces:

First of all, Nine Night, when somebody die. That was a gala affair; that was like a big social event. A Nine Night where you are at the house or the yard of the dead and you sing songs and you clap hands and you eat and you drink. You play dominoes. Sometimes you wonder when somebody is going to die [laughter]. This was an avenue to get out. . . . For the poor people, they did not have dances to go.

From earlier Jamaican funerary traditions to the earliest rural social events that included sound systems in the 1950s, dance halls have evolved into dancehall, a word that connotes a bubbling energetic urban sphere with blasting sound systems and highly adorned fashions. Dancehall events, originally occurring after midnight during the Christmas season,³ now take place as frequently as every day throughout the week. Dancehall has also gained considerable global popularity with dancehall videos circulating all over the world and dancehall queens emerging from places as far away as Japan. Dancehalls in Kingston are now a destination event for foreigners as well as Jamaicans returning home for the holidays.

As with the traditions of Nine Night, dancehalls feature not only music and dancing but a form of social control embodied in the DJ, or selector, who often lectures on society’s ills and issues edicts on correct and incorrect behavior in the community.⁴ A common theme in the dancehall sphere are the exuberant displays of sexuality espoused by the DJs as well as in the lyrics of a variety of songs and the explicit moves of particular dances—all often admonished by upper-class Jamaicans as “slackness.”⁵ This theme echoes traditional Jamaican dances of the past such as the Dinki Mini,⁶ often performed at Nine Nights in the rural areas in the eastern part of the island, exemplifying the balance between life and death that is integral to African performative traditions. And as Sonja Stanley Niaah (2010, 35) points out, social control is also enforced through contemporary dancehall locations. Like the plantation dances of slave-era Jamaica, urban dancehalls can be positioned within spatially restricted, heavily policed, and marginal settings.

Because the dancehall sphere is an urban sphere, it is composed primarily of poor, darker-skinned Jamaicans living in the inner cities. These communities are disproportionately exposed to violence and associated with violence in the minds of upper-class Jamaicans. It is, therefore, not unusual that the dancehall continues to include references to death in the form of phrases such as the “dead artist dub,” which memorializes deceased artists or a fight “to the [End Page 170] death” in a sound clash, where the goal is to “kill” the opposing sound system (Macleod 2019). Other references include a dance called the “drop-dead,” which sometimes includes the addition of make-shift coffins (Brown 2017, 25), or the ornate and expensive “bling” funerals that often accompany the violent death of a famous dancehall performer.⁷ Erin Macleod (2019) states the following regarding the proximity of death and the dancehall sphere:

If holding a wake is a custom that combines grief with celebration, life with death, so, too, is the dancehall, which itself challenges physical and metaphorical borders and boundaries. The open circular area begins with people lining the edges but gradually fills as the night goes on, and holds songs that speak of love, hate, death, life, party, revolution, and more.

In much of the existing scholarship on dancehall, in addition to multiple references to relationships to death, there is often evidence of African continuities, with particular emphasis on Jamaican funerary and masquerade traditions such as Nine Night and Jonkonnu. In “Swagga: Fashion, Kinaesthetics and Gender in Dancehall and Hip-Hop,” Lena Delgado Torres connects dancehall’s signature fashion, as well as the aesthetics of Jonkonnu, to the African continent through “a discourse of Pan-African gender and dance” (2011, 1). Delgado Torres argues, “The new dancehall masculinity, the costuming and masquerade of Jonkonnu processions are African Diasporic gender identity constructs which defy Western categories of masculinity and femininity” (5). She further observes, “It is important to note that the expressions of gender present in Jonkonnu really go beyond masculinity and femininity to denote an African Jamaican, African Diasporic, Black expression of gender which is quite different from Western understandings” (6).

Methodology

While previous scholarship has shown both that the dancehall sphere stems from Jamaica’s African cultural formations and that Ebony Patterson’s work is profoundly influenced by dancehall, the relevance of these African traditions to Patterson’s work has been missing from the discussion and will, therefore, be the focus of this article. My analysis of Patterson’s art applies a primarily formalist methodology with textual analysis of anthropological and sociological fieldwork documents to support my criticism. Iconography and semiotic methodologies—identifying and interpreting symbols and their meanings in multiple and changing contexts—common strategies in art history, are also employed. In this vein, it is important to highlight that my analysis of [End Page 171] Patterson’s aesthetics incorporates a Yoruba sensibility. To do this, I examine Yoruba elements in Patterson’s work through the lens of a concept called àṣẹ.

Yoruba scholar Rowland Abiodun describes àṣẹ as essential to Yoruba aesthetics, manifesting itself as “forceful, exuberant, and expansive” (2001, 20). Art historian Robert Farris Thompson (2007) adds to this discussion, calling àṣẹ a spiritual command that has the power to bring things into being, to create. In his scholarship on how Yoruba view art, Babatunde Lawal (1996, 7) states, “[B]ecause of the special skills involved in its creation, art is often associated with the supernatural and thought to embody a kind of àṣẹ.”

It is important to note that the term àṣẹ is used in many different contexts to imbue the essence of power and agency; but when considering artistic aesthetics, àṣẹ is intricately interwoven with ideas of connoisseurship and includes essential concepts of beauty, or ewa. The concepts that are integral to determining the presence of àṣẹ in an object, performance, ritual, or living thing are àṣà, ìwà, itutu, and ara, translating as style, character, coolness, and the ability to amaze, respectively. Something with àṣẹ has an inspiring and evocative power, usually exhibiting a balance of opposing ideas such as peaceful/warlike or feminine/masculine (Ainslie 2015).

Intrinsic to àṣẹ is a concept of “bling” or “shine,” which makes visual the inner glow of the àṣẹ and is culled from examples of the ornate adornments found within dancehalls, including jewelry and clothing embellished to excess. This excess is understood as an attempt to make a point about the erasure of the body and pre-eminence of the accoutrement in establishing status and identity. And in the case where outfits and embellishments are matching or coordinating, dress indicates membership in a specific posse or dance group. The most definitive analysis of Patterson’s work to date can be found in Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice by Caribbean art historian Krista Thompson (2015). Thompson’s analysis of Patterson’s work occurs within a greater discussion of the use of video cameras to record dancehall events and the resulting glare of the video light on the illuminated body of the dancehall performer. Thompson relates that Patterson’s piece, with its surface aesthetics of shiny materials, also highlights the “blinging” of the skin, or skin-bleaching, that is ubiquitous in the dancehall sphere (156).

Patterson’s work further calls to attention the ambivalent ways dancehall is both seen and un-visible in the Black public sphere through her use of embellishment. Her work foregrounds, I suggest, how dancehall subjects are always at risk of disappearance through the very technologies they use to bring [End Page 172] themselves into visibility. The ornate pieces produce an aesthetic overload, with figures sometimes getting visually lost in the backdrops, in what they wear, in the ground of the photographic setting. Sometimes the male figures in her work are also covered over the entirety of their skins in glitter, making their bodies into reflective surfaces among other surfaces. These subjects are so embellished they are barely legible

(Thompson 2015, 164).

While Thompson’s scholarship on shine focuses primarily on the history and effects of lens-based technologies in the visual culture of the African Diaspora, this passage on video lighting within the dancehall sphere and how it relates to Patterson’s work does not define shine in an African context—an element that is necessary for a full understanding of Patterson’s work.

Shine and bling evoke ideas similar to those of a Yoruba Egúngún suit. For Egúngún, the layers of cloth adorned with sequins and meaningful iconography function esoterically as a sacred space for the embodiment of the lineage ancestor, only activated when “a masker enters the costume, transformed into the presence and power of the ancestors in an Egúngún ceremony” (Fitzgerald, Drewal, and Okediji 1995, 55). Status as communicated in dancehall style through expensive labels, logos, and jewelry are also reminiscent of the prestige conveyed by an excessively, elaborately adorned Egúngún suit. These suits elegantly and extravagantly adorn the ancestor, who has returned briefly to visit the living, and serve as an important status symbol for the family that commissions and dances the mask (Drewal 1978).

Robert Farris Thompson (2006) relates the importance that Yoruba place on luminosity and shine. When a carver creates a work with a surface so smooth that it shines, the work seems to reflect light as if from an inner source. This light or shine can be understood as a visual signifier of the àṣẹ of an object making itself visible to the viewer. Qualities of shine indicate that an object will have a long life and that it will be regarded as beautiful. Yoruba regard objects that have smooth shiny surfaces and that exude a specific kind of splendor to be almost talismanic in their power. To glimmer, therefore, makes one immune to danger and ready to embody an otherworldly presence and status (Thompson 2006, 253–55). As Thompson writes,

One of the most interesting extensions of the Yoruba taste for luminosity is the depiction of clothing. Because Yoruba artists devoutly desire to create well-polished surfaces that reflect large amounts of light, they do not treat substances, which in reality are soft, with realistically softened textures. When a Yoruba carves a head tie, turban, cap, or gown, he exaggerates its bulk and [End Page 173] polishes it to a high sheen. Drapery conventionally has a consistency which resembles sheet metal far more than it does cloth.

(2006, 255)

Thompson describes the effect of dance on the shiny surfaces of Yoruba sculpture in a way that we can imagine propels the bling culture of the dancehall sphere into the realm of the fantastic and magical: “The short durational values of Yoruba music propel sculpture in the dance with staccato movements that blur the vision. Shadow against shining surfaces acts as a counter-effect to this blurring” (2006, 254). The motionless Egúngún costume itself, therefore, cannot properly convey the function of the Egúngún in its embodiment as a shining, dancing, whirling shrine, a living embodiment of that which is ordinarily still.

Besides shiny beads, sequins, and small mirrors, layers of lappets, on an Egúngún, are decorated with patchwork patterns that create a “juxtaposition of triangles and/or squares of sharply contrasting colors to make the cloth ‘shine’” (Thompson Drewal and Drewal 1978, 30). Henry Drewal describes the effect of the patchwork effect of the cloth on the moving dancer:

The composition produces a highly textured optical surface that vibrates. There is no focal point. . . . Ultimately the kinetic quality of such a composition, like much optical art, tends to hypnotize or disorient the observer, thus heightening the ephemeral qualities of these masqueraders or ara orun, “beings from beyond.”

(Thompson Drewal and Drewal 1978, 30)

Braids, tassels, and amulets can also be added to the costume to increase its performative power and ultimately its àṣẹ. This “bling” serves as spiritual protection for the Egúngún as well as the masquerader inside the cloth.

For Yoruba, cloth is the primary symbol of sophistication, most poignantly expressed through the purchase of expensive fabrics to adorn one’s lineage Egúngún. Yoruba scholar Bolaji Campbell (2019) states,

What defines individuals in society is the way they use cloth to express their individual identities, social statuses, and roles within the larger community. According to Rowland Abiodun, “One’s social unit is often described metaphorically as one’s cloth, because it protects, beautifies, and hints at immortality.” It is an expression of “the cloth that never dies.” Indeed, Yoruba celebrate the place of cloth as the most appropriate signifier and marker of collective identity.⁸

Furthermore, each Yoruba deity has a particular color preference that functions as “the magnetic force that draw us near to them.”⁹ Hence, cloth ties the individual both spiritually and physically to the community and its values. [End Page 174]

In Yoruba culture, dress also holds weighty associations with social position and status. The more elaborately a person is dressed, the more social power and prestige she or he is viewed as having (Bascom 1951, 491).¹⁰ In Yoruba society, important proverbs and teachings relating nakedness with infancy, insanity, and lack of social responsibility highlight the historical relevance of cloth and dress (Bascom 1951, passim). On a variety of social occasions, cloth allows families the opportunity to exhibit their social position and wealth. One particularly significant way to perform prestige is through funerals and masquerades that honor the deceased. Status is bolstered with an excessively adorned Egúngún. These performances are integral to social status, spectacles that operate as style wars because aesthetic competition creates unique and inventive innovations.

The cloth encasing the Egúngún is also a signifier of gender, with brightly colored and embellished cloth representing male ancestors, while the masked embodiment of female ancestors is portrayed as completely white with minimal accoutrements. Along with Shango, symbolized with red and white, Oya and Ogun form a triad of Yoruba deities that speak to specific ideals of feminine and masculine behavior. Oya, the wife of Ogun, fails to have children with him even as he is described as the aggressive patron deity of warriors and war chiefs. While Ogun’s rugged masculinity fails to give Oya children, Shango eventually impregnates her with nine sons, the first eight of whom are mute; the ninth child is Egúngún (Thompson 1974, 221). What is it about the representation of Shango that allows him to be ultimately virile and fruitful in his relationship with Oya? According to anthropologist James Lorand Matory, Shango represents the embodiment of both male and female characteristics. He is described both in Africa and the diaspora as charming, accommodating, and debonair. He is described in Yoruba cosmology as a warrior but a prince as well. With a royal pedigree and a glossy persona, Shango is persuasive, velvety, and suave. His sexiness makes him the ultimate progenitor; therefore, he is described as more successful than Ogun with women, governance, and community relations, demonstrating the characteristics that the Yoruba feel best exemplify masculinity. Role models for men in Yoruba culture, thus, champion the combination of male and female characteristics that are seen as embodied in Shango (Matory 2005, 6–9; Willis 2018, 57–58). What is most significant is that Shango creates descendants, multiple and prominent (Egúngún), and this further emphasizes his virility and ultimate social success.

These iconic characteristics of gender fluidity that leads to a success with women and ultimately sexuality, fertility, and status are also clearly embodied [End Page 175] in the styles and symbolisms within the dancehall sphere. Keeping in mind that these demonstrations of sexual prowess, through specific dances and lyrics, are ultimately wrapped up in communicating the effective ability to produce descendants, John Thabiti Willis explains how this understanding of descendants is expanded within the traditional Yoruba institution of Egúngún:

Through Egúngún performances, participants create and expand kinship through actions that identify themselves as children or loyal followers of the same ancestor and oblige other “followers” or observers to meet the demands of deference, labor, money, and so on, required by the ancestor. In essence, Egúngún performances redefine kinship beyond biology and marriage to include all of humanity as descendants of the deceased

(Willis 2018, 11).

The Aesthetics of Urban Masculinity: A Social History of Cloth and Kinship

In New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849, scholar Elizabeth Maddock Dillon argues that clothing and adornment were used by enslaved Africans as a way to structure identity and to display forms of kinship in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Jamaica. In the system of slavery in the Americas, which denied Africans their genealogical history, cloth and adornment allowed enslaved Africans to form kinship groups and affiliations and to create a sense of community and family, “the scraps of cloth in which bodies are wrapped [serving] as ineluctable signifiers of the relations that bind people to one another, across and despite the structural violence of slavery” (Maddock Dillon 2014, 189).

Later in the colonial period, African Jamaicans performed annual Christmas and New Year’s sketches, often in the form of raucous satire that commented on social hierarchies and power relations. One of the masquerade characters, John Canoe (“Jonkonnu”) was “frequently highly ornamented with beads, tinsel, spangles, pieces of looking glass” (Belisario 1837). In his 1993 Gleaner article, “Fancy Dress and the Roots of Culture: From Jonkonnu to Dancehall,” Rex Nettleford relates that the tulle and dark glasses, as well as the sequins, beads, and costume jewelry of the dancehall participants, are “all reminiscent of the pieces of broken mirror on the fancy dress of traditional Jonkonnu.”¹¹

In keeping with African traditions, Jamaican Jonkonnu are also dependent on an assortment of embellished textiles in a variety of textures and colors. [End Page 176] These costumes, like the favored dress of dancehall participants, reflect light, luminosity, and shine, with gleaming adornments, broken mirrors, sequins, and beads. In arguing for the masquerade’s Egúngún origins, Sylvia Wynter (1970, 38) goes as far as to describe an Egúngún as “in effect a Jonkonnu,” the embodiment of a deceased ancestor that returns from the spiritual realm to visit his descendants.

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Figure 2.

John Canoe Festival celebrants, Kingston, Jamaica, Christmas 1975 (digitized from Kodachrome original). Image courtesy of WikiPedant.

While we have much evidence and increasing scholarship on exactly how Jonkonnu may be related to a myriad of west and central African masquerade traditions,¹² to focus specifically on the influence of the aesthetics of Egúngún and Jonkonnu on Patterson’s work highlights the unexpected way that the cultural aesthetics of Africa survive and continue to insert themselves into the art production of the contemporary diaspora, with or without the invitation of the cultural producer.

The making of Patterson’s Egúngún begins in 2010, after the passing of her father. At this point, the artist shifted the focus of her work to dealing with issues of death. These new works utilized cloth instead of paper yet still reflected her continued consideration of the dancehall style and the self-fashioning of urban masculinity that had been her focus for a number of years. [End Page 177] Confronted with a very personal loss, Patterson’s mind turned to examining the senseless deaths of young men in the inner cities of Kingston. Until this time, her work had dealt predominantly with fashion and bling culture in a number of mixed media on paper works; but, after the death of her father, “something shifted” and the undercurrents of the work started to exhibit more specifically how the activity of dress or adornment worked as a kind of political response for those that she felt were rendered invisible. Weaving her personal memorial into a tapestry of concerns for the community at large, Patterson becomes the archetypal deferent descendant redefining kinship to include all of humanity as descendants of the deceased (Willis 2018, 11). Her first Egúngún necessarily evolves into a series of Egúngún venerating the fallen victims of violence within the Kingston community. Patterson’s memorial to her father is, therefore, created as part of an oeuvre of works that also honors the flamboyant styles of men in the dancehall sphere and commemorates their lives.

Visualizing her father, Patterson staged a photograph, transformed it into a six-foot jacquard woven tapestry, and embellished it with glitter, sequins and metal.¹³ As part of the process of commemorating her father’s death as a rite of passage, Patterson created a layered, textile façade, cloth and more cloth, stitched, embroidered, ornamented, and adorned, appropriately titled The Passing (Dead Daadi) (Fig. 1). The details of this tapestry are telling. Shiny sequined bottles decorate the room and chain links act as jewelry, alternately adorning and imprisoning the body. A beaded cap displays a skull, and a change purse lies forlorn on the bright-pink concrete block beside the body. Tassels pull back the floral-sequined curtains to expose the body, bejeweled in a military-type fashion associated with dancehall style and with warriors in general, whether they be Dessalines, a leader of the Haitian revolution, or Ogun, the diaspora’s god of iron, often symbolized by a machete. Shiny bright blue pants with gold buttons are artfully juxtaposed with a sparkly pink woven background. Taking much from the traditions of Haiti’s sequined drapos,¹⁴ the layered clothing and elaborate fabrics are reminiscent of Jamaica’s Jonkonnu traditions. As with Jonkonnu, The Passing (Dead Daadi) is simultaneously vibrant and grotesque, dynamic and alarming, raucous and melancholy. It embodies the vibrant flora of the Jamaican landscape, lush and overwhelming, too often enclosed behind the walled gardens of the elite and behind the gates of all-inclusive resorts. With a cacophony of riotous color, pattern, and composition, Patterson’s tapestry is surprisingly composed and, I would suggest, embodies àṣẹ, a compelling aesthetic force that contains an evocative power. [End Page 178]

With The Passing (Dead Daadi) Patterson’s relationship to death and dancehall, the masculine and the feminine are eloquently communicated through cloth. (Dead Daadi) is also a culmination of the considerations of earlier works that revolve around Patterson’s initial curiosity about dancehall and its culture of Jamaican men cultivating forms of feminized fashion and self-care. Examples of this phenomena include the donning of tight pants, vibrant patterned clothing, and excessive jewelry, as well as waxing, eyebrow plucking, and skin-bleaching. Patterson, along with numerous scholars who examine dancehall fashion, question the odd juxtaposition of dynamic and aggressive masculinity (which frequently includes virulent homophobia) existing alongside the increasingly feminized appearance, mannerisms, and concerns of men within the dancehall community. How is it that these seemingly opposite expressions seem to coexist in the same space?

While Patterson’s work has often been discussed in terms of how dancehall fashion and culture function as a celebration of the disenfranchised, scholarly criticism of her work and of recent dancehall culture in general tends to revolve around postures of machismo rooted in spectacle where men, like the women in the dancehall community, are primarily concerned with a level of cosmetic maintenance and procuring expensive fashions that engage them with “creative and public displays of economic wealth” (Hope 2004, 109). In her essay “The British Link-Up Crew: Consumption Masquerading as Masculinity in the Dancehall,” Donna Hope discusses some of the excessive grooming requirements necessary to maintain the new “feminized” dancehall look (109). These include facials, manicures, pedicures, frequent visits to hair salons, purchase of bleaching creams, expensive name-brand clothing, shoes, jewelry, and other expensive accessories such as pricey vehicles and the ability to travel overseas:

Ultimately, the fantastic elaboration of the British Link-Up costume and its attendant masquerade of elegance and overt consumption is the primary strategy that these men use to attain higher levels of masculine status in the dancehall. . . . The cool pose of these male icons in the dancehall re-presents a costumed reality and a visual spectacle that are mediated and policed within the (virtual) reality of the dancehall by a multiplicity of actors.

(2004, 113)

But Hope is also adamant that “significant masculine power is bestowed on men who are reputedly engaged in illegal and or violent activities,” regardless of the focus on consumption, maintenance, and adornment (107). Patterson responded to this juxtaposition with great artistic interest. “I thought, well, criminality, beauty . . . How do I even begin to visually merge these things?” [End Page 179] (Laughlin 2012). Patterson was also fascinated to read in a tabloid article that men were lightening their skin not just for beauty but also as a tactic to evade the police:

While the police would be looking for a dark-skinned person, really what’s out there is a much lighter-skinned person. . . . With my prior interests in the female body and dialogues around beauty and the grotesque and the body, that article started to get me thinking in a slightly different direction.¹⁵

This skin-bleaching as a form of subterfuge can be extended to a variety of different readings that extend to concepts of liminality, which are integral to masquerade culture. The process of bleaching the skin renders the Black body both highly visible in the video light and contributes to what Krista Thompson refers to as a “[strategy] to be rendered legible under the intense illumination of the video light [, calling] attention to the broader un-visibility of darker-skinned subjects in contemporary Jamaican society” (2015, 141). But bleaching also allows one to become invisible and disappear as a viable suspect when the police are profiling darker-skinned individuals. This intersection of visibility with invisibility can be read as a form of play that is most often used in African masquerade and performance traditions and is often incorporated into other ritual traditions.

In further considering how other forms of adornment act like a metaphor for the lived experiences of dancehall participants, Bibi Bakare-Yusuf (2006) looks at dress, making a connection between the violence of the inner cities of Kingston and jeans with holes in them, mirroring the bullet holes that are ubiquitous to the dancehall landscape: “The violence, anxiety and vulnerability of daily life are stitched into the designs of the fabric. The culture of gunning and knifing down opponents that characterizes ghetto life is visually woven into the sheered tops and the motifs of bullet holes in the jeans”¹⁶ The fashions of dancehall, including skin-bleaching and clothing, can, therefore, be read as iconographies that reflect an accumulation of cultural influences as well as reflections of violent reality.

This violent reality significantly shifted the focus of Ebony Patterson’s work. In the very year that her father became sick and died—the summer of 2010—Kingston security forces staged a violent incursion in the community of Tivoli Gardens in an effort to locate and extradite to the United States community leader and don Christopher Coke, who was facing gun and drug charges.¹⁷ Patterson recalls that over 72 young men were strategically targeted, profiled, arrested and murdered by Kingston police. A devastating tragedy for Kingston, the incursion still leaves many questions unanswered, namely, who was being targeted, how were bodies handled, and which means [End Page 180] the security forces chose to extract and detain people.¹⁸ The events of 2010 influenced Patterson to create new bodies of work dealing with questions about the lack of accountability and acknowledgment of the senseless brutality experienced by young men living in poorer communities in Jamaica, with fewer opportunities, darker skin, and no viable voice. In this vein, Patterson asks, “What does it mean then for particular bodies, working class people—predominantly dark-skinned poor people to be arrested so easily, for their lives to be taken so easily . . . without any question?”¹⁹

At this juncture, Patterson began to make a body of works to be included in an exhibition titled Dead Treez. The flamboyant aspects of dancehall fashion created an aesthetic of bling that was so evocative and alluring that it would draw attention not only to her work but to the lost lives of murder victims, particularly the disenfranchised communities of Jamaica. A series of tapestries and textile floor works featured images of murdered victims taken from social media, which Patterson then embellished until they were rendered almost invisible. She relates that these bodies became positioned like those at a crime scene; the surfaces, adorned and decorated, emphasizing the body as a contested site and the skin another dimension of dress. But what did it mean to be rendered visible yet invisible at the same time, to experience an “erasure that is motivated by a desire for presence?”²⁰

To answer this, we can look to the traditions of the ancestors. Egúngún, too, must negotiate similar issues of visibility and presence as they act as agents of social control. As moral inquisitors from beyond, although spectral and calming, Egúngún often invoke the threat of actual violence as a means of policing both social and ritual actors. Egúngún are also correlated with virulent masculinity, as it is only men who wear the masks during ritual performances and the masquerade societies have always been the domain of high-ranking men in Yoruba society. Historically, Egúngún were at times employed as executioners, some so violent that they were eventually banned by village chiefs (Willis 2018, passim). This conflation of violence, death, and masculinity adorned with sequins, shiny fabrics, and powerful amulets creates a picture of a historical juxtaposition that could shed some light on the flamboyant, excessive adornment that characterizes dancehall masculinity.

The Jonkonnu masqueraders, as well, were described by witnesses as incorporating violence, death, and resurrection into the very fabric of their performances: “whatever might have been the performance, a combat and death invariably ensued,” as these “self-styled Performers . . . dared to perpetuate ‘murder most foul’ even on the plays of Shakespeare” (Maddock Dillon 2014, 205–6).

As Margaret Thompson Drewal states in her analysis of Egúngún: [End Page 181]

Egungun performances reshape perceptions of the world and give concrete form to ontological concepts. Ritual specialists bring that which is normally inaccessible, unseen, or imagined, into the phenomenal world where it can be observed and contemplated. Through a practical mastery of performance techniques, the maskers manipulate the perceptual world, the world as it is experienced daily; they play upon, embellish, and transform reality, or, more appropriately, illusion reveals an otherwise undisclosed reality. The performers possess àṣẹ, the power to bring things into existence.

(1992, 90)

As with Egúngún, the re-establishment and redefinition of kinship relationships are embodied in the performance and play of dancehall artists. Reeling from generations of historical practices that attempted to replace the African identities of enslaved peoples, dancehall protagonists reinvent their genealogical heritage by forming social bonds within their dancehall communities through specific rituals of adornment and excess. Prescribed names, clothing, and other emblems of ownership imposed on the bodies of the enslaved attempted to create a social death for people of the African Diaspora. Dancehall artists, therefore, use cloth as the ultimate signifier of social bonds and kinship, creating avenues for community healing and for manipulating the perceptual world they occupy. Tight pants, sunglasses, facial bleaching, tattoos, and elaborate hairstyles abound in the dancehall, transcending to an entirely new level of the bling that is also rendered in Patterson’s elaborate textile works. In Patterson’s manifestations, the protagonists are heavily adorned, transformed into material entities, tapestries, or mannequins enveloped in sequins, glitter, tassels, brooches, and beads. The traditional masking of Egúngún and Jonkonnu are replaced by sunglasses that, dancehall participants reveal, put them in an altered state, unaware and less self-conscious of the crowd around them (Delgado Torres 2015). Skin-bleaching and all the other various attempts at transforming the self offer yet another mask, an attempt to play, to reshape perceptions of the world. Even the sweat of the dancers, their clothes stuck to their skin, evokes the Yoruba belief that a person’s sweat mingled with clothing strengthens the connection between the wearer and the cloth (Oyeniyu 2015, passim).

By 1830, the Shakespearian element of Jonkonnu seems to have no longer been a part of the seasonal performances (Thompson 2007, 99), but the “Actor Boys” still paraded the streets of Kingston “with exuberant, spectacular and lavish materiality” (Maddock Dillon 2014, 211). Nineteenth-century Jamaican artist Issac Belisario describes these dancers as competing with one another in a struggle for superiority, the vanity of excelling in the costliness of their [End Page 182] attire a benchmark as to how they are judged: Who is the smartest dressed? Who dances most majestically?²¹

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Figure 3.

Ebony Patterson, Swag Swag Krew (From the Out and Bad Series), 2011–14. Image courtesy Monique Meloche Gallery.

These styles of music, dance, rhythm, color, and fashion were reconstituted through the dancehall in the manner of the Yoruba concept of àṣẹ, echoing their original source of inspiration in unexpected ways. Within the ritual space of the dancehall, evidence of the concerns, preoccupations, desires, and dreams of ancestors pulsate to a syncopated beat, adorned and embellished with dazzling àṣẹ. These protagonists, whether living or deceased, leave their mark in the names of specific dances or in the lyrics of particular songs. How they cover their bodies reflects much about chosen families and alliances within community.

Conclusion

Throughout this article, I have demonstrated how the importance of cloth and the spiritual concept of àṣẹ embodied in fabrics, and therefore clothing, expanded into the world at large and transformed actors, events, and materials for centuries in disparate locales influenced by a multitude of social factors. In The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities, Doris Sommer proposes such a life for art as creative works that “morph into institutional innovation” (2014, 105). She asks important questions about art and accountability and how art has the potential to guide us “toward existing interventions as well as their corollaries, which amount to a call to action” [End Page 183] (105). Sommer’s call to action is, indeed, a call for àṣẹ and the works of art, social contexts, and performative potential that àṣẹ brings into being.

Like the pulsating style and fashion of the Jamaican dancehall, Ebony Patterson’s The Passing (Dead Daadi) clearly embodies àṣẹ in its myriad references to Jamaican and African funerary and masquerade traditions, its efforts to make visible the cloth that holds the deceased bodies of Jamaica’s invisible and underrepresented men, and its efforts to commemorate the departed ancestor. In the process of weaving together these disparate areas of historical scholarship and criticism, something entirely unexpected about her work emerges in the form of cloth: a revival of the formal aesthetics and philosophies of the African sacred is clearly woven within the cloth of dancehall culture, illuminating its connections to survival, kinship, status, and community. But Patterson’s work does something else as well. It asks us to act, to somehow right the wrong with which we are faced. It draws us in with a “vital power, an energy, the great strength of all things” (Pierre Verger, quoted in Preston Blier 2017, 75). It binds us and ties us with the very cloth of who we are. In the rhythm of this visual àṣẹ, we find our ancestors and create our descendants.

Patterson’s iconographies reflect not only a contemplation of the way that urban contemporary Jamaican culture grapples with the production of masculinities and the reality of death but also unexpectedly demonstrate a deep connection to West African rituals of memorializing and resurrecting the dead. In this artist’s heavily ornamented works, we find the unexpected remnants of traditional Nigerian Egúngún in the dynamic contemporary urban performance of dancehall, as she renders its protagonists, both the dead and the living, as intentional agents who evoke the journey of life and its subsequent hardships with pageantry, pathos, and the ultimate sovereignty of àṣẹ.