Interview with Robert Farris ThompsonAuthor(s): Donald J. Cosentino and Robert Farris ThompsonReviewed work(s):Source: African Arts, Vol. 25, No. 4, 100th Issue (Oct., 1992), pp. 52-63Published by: UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies CenterStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3336967 .Accessed: 20/02/2012 15:19

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INTERVIEW WITH

ROBERT FARRIS THOMPSON DONALD J. COSENTINO

Robert Farris Thompson is Professor of African and Afro-American Art History and Master of

Timothy Dwight College at Yale University. He has done field research in a daunting number of

African and New World African cultures. His publications and exhibitions reflect this diversity, being cir-

cumscribed only by the ever expanding reverberations of mambo. Thompson's books include Black Gods

and Kings (1971), African Art in Motion (1974), The Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two

Worlds (1981), and Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (1983).

He is presently working on an exhibition called "Black Atlantic Art and Altars" (The Center for African

Art, New York) and serving as a consultant and writer for "The Sacred Arts of Vodou" (UCLA).

-I-

oo d

October 21, 1991

We are sitting at a table in the Master's study of Timothy Dwight College. The study, like the col- lege, is built and appointed in the New England Georgian style. On the door leading into the study is a life-size poster of the boxer Muhammed Ali.

DC I was going to begin this interview in a

square diachronic way, asking you about your past and all that. But now that I'm here, I'm not going to do that. Let's make this more of a Rorschach. To me the name "Bob

Thompson," aside from a considerable bibli-

ography, suggests an attitude of "enjoyment" in scholarship. I mean the enjoyment I feel in

reading your work, but more significantly, the

enjoyment that you seem to feel in working with African cultures. To what extent does my reaction reflect your experience? To what extent has the enjoyment of African cultures motivated your work? And to what extent do

you think that such pleasure is a necessary motivation for doing fieldwork in Africa and the Diaspora?

RFT Well, that is a capsule question, one of the capital issues. One of the for-

mal goals of West and Central African reli-

1. MAMBA MAMBO BY ALISON SAAR. UNITED STATES, 1985. BEADS, SEQUINS, EMBROIDERY, FABRIC; 51cm x 46cm. PRIVATE COLLECTION.

gions is spirit possession (Fig. 5). And one of the ways of glossing possession is ecstasy. Therefore, if ecstasy is a formal goal of those

religions, when all enthusiasms seemingly converge and-casse-you are broken by plea- sure in a strange kind of transcendental pain, and pushed to the level of the Iwa, or orisha, or minkisi-if that's the goal, then how dare one even consider studying these cultures without a modicum of enthusiasm. If possession's the

goal, then it cuts in space a key that enthusi- asm will fit. I find that when I do fieldwork, the fact that I am unashamedly enthusiastic facilitates the research process.

Dc Does attitude differentiate field re- search in Africa from parallel research

in China or Europe? Someone once said to me that he didn't understand why it was expected that people who did research in Africa would be advocates for Africa, since it wasn't under- stood that if you did Chinese studies you actu-

ally had to like China, or if you did European studies you actually had to like France or

Germany. He was criticizing the expectation that the Africanist researcher would be per- sonally or emotionally engaged in African or Black Atlantic cultures.

RFT That phrasing seems to be infelici- tous-the idea of "being expected to

like," rather than, through hard work and contacts with these cultures, finding yourself pushed to an ecstatic level, which can be a

very serious thing. Because again, I only work

through the folk models. One of the rules is that before we construct our own model we build on the folk model. And the folk model

already glosses core Afro-Atlantic religious art as ecstatic.

Afro-Atlantic material demands-how shall I phrase it-"like" is too pallid a verb-

being conmoved. As you cross the cosmogram in Central African religion, you cross it with

ecstasy. When an ibeji image is brought before me to discuss (Fig. 2), it can be seen through my body language how much the ritual means to me. I should think that would make the mother know that her child is appreciated (Fig. 3). And which mother wants her child

analyzed in a crudely objective way? On the other hand, there is a danger here: if you are seen to be perennially enthusiastic, you are

devaluing yourself in terms of old-fashioned Germanic modes of what is scholarship. You are

subtracting from the seriousness. But I don't believe that scholarship is a zero-sum game. I think the more ecstatic you are, the more com- mitted you are to being serious. You crisscross

play and work as you try in all humility to arrive at the democratic facts. By the "demo- cratic facts" I mean not as one Mukongo thinks, but hopefully as many Bakongo think. And then I can release myself. It has to be an earned ecstasy, is what I'm trying to say.

So this is what the neo-puritans who

might be a little put off at the ecstatic level in African-American scholarship cannot under- stand: that it is an earned ecstasy. That just as

you can't do fieldwork until you speak the

language, so you cannot be casse until you have something to be broken. This traversing of the Atlantic-you've done it, a lot of people have done it-but the more you crisscross, the more integument you meet, the more resistance, the tougher you become. It gives you more and more right to get happy.

DC Enough Rorschach. Let me reverse my- self and get back into the square part of

this interview. I want to go back to the begin- ning and ask how you got set off on the Black Atlantic voyage. What were the original im-

pulses? Let me string some things together for

53

IL

PHOTO: LARRY DUPONT. COURTESY OF THE UCLA FOWLER MUSEUM OF CULTURAL HISTORY

, .,,

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PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE UCLA FOWLER MUSEUM OF CULTURAL HISTORY

you: Were there things in your personal life that started you off on the study of Black Atlan- tic cultures? Were there early culture heroes?

RFT Okay, I can answer that. It was not one thing, however; it was a combination

of the following. Number one, in the '40s when I was a kid in grammar school-Dudley School in El Paso-the boogie-woogie period was in full swing. So I sat down at the piano and tried to piece it together from a guy named Lloyd Stevens who was one of my earliest mentors because he played piano blues flawlessly. Then

there was this African American I met by the name of Jessy Brown who sang blues field hollers. Later, I was on the piano, playing boo- gie-woogie, and I looked around and there were people around me. So I got the picture: boogie instantly generates people. Black music communalizes. That was lesson one.

Lesson two: I saw at an early age that the African Americans had a different spiritual vision. I could sense it. And in a way, what I've done since explains these early influ- ences to myself. Once I came into a living room of a family that was very proud of

TOP: 2. TWIN FIGURES (IBEJI) IN THE UCLA FOWLER MUSEUM OF CULTURAL HISTORY. FROM THOMPSON'S BLACK GODS AND KINGS (1971: OPP. CH. 13/1).

BOTTOM: 3. FRAME FROM THOMPSON'S FILM OF YORUBA MOTHERS DANCING WITH IBEJI. AJILETE, EGBADO, NIGERIA; AUGUST 1964. FROM BLACK GODS AND KINGS

(1971: CH. 13, FIG. 12).

some crystal sconces that were dangling under candles on a mantle. The Anglo-Saxons I played football with either said nothing or "Oh, that's kinda pretty." The one African American stared at the crystals and said, "That's heaven-like!" [snaps fingers]. He was culturally prepared to start talking immedi- ately about crystals, quartz, and glitter in cor- respondence with spirit, the most perfect gift from above. That haunted me. Heaven-like. When the world, in David Hammons's phrasing, becomes a chandelier.

DC Did you remember that comment after you went to reflecting cultures?

RFT Yes. The comment floated deep in my mind, never forgotten. Only this

weekend in New York I saw a Kongo-Cuban altar: a huge glittering piece of quartz to the right, and an Elegba image on the left. And then this huge leopard pelt rising. This is a New York black altar, but that piece of quartz is there because ancient Bakongo equally deemed this wondrous stone a medium of transcendence and protection. People will say: "Aw, come on. Is a Polish factory worker in Detroit going to remember Polish religious stuff? And even if he did remember his folk- lore, how do we know that this person in El Paso remembered his?" But then, if you are into folklore you know that indeed certainly not all Polish Americans have Polish altars, but there will be, somewhere, one or two self- appointed or spiritually called custodians of the tradition. We are not talking about every single person. We are talking about seers and visionaries, who react to crystal and to light in ways that Lonnie Holley, James Hampton, and others have made famous in African- American civilizations.

A third lesson was Jessy Brown, haunting the hell out of me by the way that he'd pick train sounds [imitate them, as music], distill- ing from this locomotion another kind of essence, quartz-like in its own way, yo- delized bluesy train-whistle sounds. And he used to sing these sounds, and I would just sit back, as if it were a Platonic seminar. I was fascinated as he performed his train quin- tessence. I had no idea that this was part of a larger perspective, train-whistle blues, because at that level of life I thought these were random, idiosyncratic moments rather than culturally guided upsurges. The train- whistle blues, the spiritual fascination with quartz and light, and the percussionization of the Western-tempered piano through boogie- woogie-these experiences, and more, were initiating my cultural preparation into Afro- Atlantic civilizations.

54

At the same time I was becoming aware of rumba. That was one of the first dances I ever did. And again, I went to this get-together with

very attractive women, and the football players were there and they just stood around when the rumba came on and I did my level best. But it wasn't just blues and rumba that prepared me for my profession. It was also gypsy cul- ture. Gypsy music also spoke to me. I collect- ed records of it when I was a kid. Romany whirling sounds that said with every eighth note-nomadism: the joys of being free. That, too, haunted me, and is one of the reasons why there are nomadic Pygmy [women's] paintings around us on the wall. But it was also the con- text, man. I lived in, drale, mano, El Paso, Tejas, tu sabes, con los chicanos, los mexicanos, los nuevo- mexicanos, and then [said in country-western accent] the "signed, sealed, and delivered, a pack- age containing my heart"-country music too. You know, you learned how to role-switch fast, if you didn't want to have your head knocked off. So I can talk that too.

Dc Sounds like you had to be born in El Paso.

RFT Oh, yeah. But El Paso High (where I went to school for one year) had

Armenians, and Dudley School had Eddie Herskovits, a person who may have been related to the Herskovits. I haven't checked that out, possible El Paso ties to Melville J. But there I was, with a Herskovits as some- one I played football with (not realizing I would be pushed into the work of another Herskovits). The fact that he was a Mexican American, does that tell us something? I

thought the world was like that: you looked out everywhere on overlapping spheres-- Native American, Latino, Anglo, Jewish.

So then, in March 1950 with Afro isotopes already percolating in my consciousness, I went to La Ciudad de Mexico and I heard this pulsing sound. First time I made contact with African multimetrics. It was called mambo. I didn't even know what it was.

Luckily, when I came back to Ciudad Juarez record stores and said, "Do you have any b-a- m-b-u?" they recoded that to what I meant. So mambo was the final fillip. I had blues in me. I had holler in me. I had a sense that

glass and glitter had usages far beyond orna- mentation. I was moved by that. But I was most profoundly moved by mambo, the mid- century music, the essential bridge between the jazz dance and rock 'n' roll.

I studied mambo through my college career. In my freshman year, spring of 1952, I went to Havana with a woman and sat at El

Templete restaurant because I had read about it apropos of Hemingway. (Hemingway sparked many influences.) El Templete was a couple of blocks from a tree I passed where I saw kittens swirling in the upper branches. The tree, Irdko, had been fed. That was the first Yoribi-influenced tree altar that I saw. And that night three guitarists looked at me,

right in the eye, and sang, "Vaya p'al monte, mi socio, vaya p'al monte"-"Move to the forest, my friend, move to the forest," as in Lydia Cabrera's forest, as in Monte. I mean, they knew. I was being hit by one Africanizing cur- rent after another: the walks, guitars, the com- mandments, the Lucumi [Cuban-Yorihba] food, and especially, the mambo.

That was my tarot card: You will follow mambo, and its roots, for the rest of your life.

Vaya p'al monte. And those roots were embed- ded in Cuba, and in Cuba I ran full tilt into Lucumi, Abakuw, Ararn, Mayomb&. If you look at my scholarship, it amounts, in many respects, to nothing more or less than gloss- ing mambo through the history of art in terms of these four major currents, ancestral to Afro-Cuban art and music.

But then in '59 a friend said, "Let's go to Haiti." And if there was anything left of me, that was the final casse. I still remember the first mambo that I met in March 1959, arms akimbo, saying, "That which we will talk about is happening, you realize, throughout the whole Republic." She wanted me to know that when we talked Rada, when we talked Petro, she was representing the nation.

DC Had you done reading and research D on Vodou?

RFT Oh, yeah. Courlander, Deren, Price- Mars. See, by this time mambo had

said, "Now hear this: You thought you were

going to be a lawyer, or you thought you'd let Mom and Dad push you towards being a doc- tor or whatever..." All those neat little mid- dle-class ambitions were like a chess counter mambo had swept off the board. I knew I had no choice. And it was kind of scary, in the sense that I wasn't sure how I could accumu- late the knowledge, where or with whom I would study. But in my senior year at Yale, spring 1955, I found a guy with a mind so

open that there was no danger anymore. By accident I wandered into George Kubler's course on on Mesoamerican antiquity. I came

alive. Here was a course where you actually memorized objects from beyond the West, that were made by men and women from another tradition. Although Mexico is technically a Western nation, we all know that it has Native American impulses everywhere. At

any rate, I got into that and on my final exam he wrote, "When you return to these themes, I will be ready." Not if, when. So after the army, and after an aborted year of law school, I wrote him I was ready.

D•C So you tried to escape mambo for a

.DI while in law school?

RFT No, even then I was busy writing a long piece for the Jazz Review on

Mexican mambo. Then I dropped out.

DC So it would be fair to say that you moved from the musical tradition to

the visual tradition, that it was the music that first captured you.

R FT Yes, and the dance. Because the Pal- ladium Ballroom at 53rd and Broad-

way was part of the training process too. Because there were no ASA [African Studies Association] meetings in 1955...but the Palladium was the ASA, and there you would see Katherine Dunham, Amiri Baraka (then Leroi Jones), and we were all there. I inter- viewed Amiri to find out his reasons and he said, "In the '50s, if you were black and you were in New York, mambo was what was hap- pening." And mambo had already confirmed

my taste for multimetrics, for offbeat phrasing of melodic accents, for dominance of percus- sive phrasing.

Through mambo, African-Atlantic traits became my analytic system, a way of viewing the whole world. And it occurred to me: if I was moved, imagine how it hit Amiri Baraka. In fact, I think one could prove that mambo is a secret engine behind a lot of famous people. Gabriel Garcia Marquez defended it. Carlos Fuentes: mambo crackles through his first

P.~I~CIL' ~ op

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PHOTO: DONALD J. COSENTINO 4. RARA DANCE IN HAITI. APRIL 1992.

55

novel, and in a marvelous way he virtually uses it against Nietzsche. The Palladium and the mambo world were like a proving ground for many African-Americanists. For instance, a distinguished guy, Oliver Holmes, who teaches history at Wesleyan-I knew I had seen him before: he was a Palladium mambo dancer. Oscar Hijuelos's Mambo Kings gives but the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

Dc What you're saying is that this scholar- ship grew out of a shared sensual

experience. That reminds me of Eric Have- lock's thesis in Preface to Plato. Havelock wres- tled with Plato's wish to rid the Republic of

poets. He conjectured that up until Plato's time, Greek kids learned their history and tra- ditions from the Iliad and the Odyssey. Not from reading the epics, but from sharing in their performance. So what Plato was really taking off against was the whole idea of link-

ing together enjoyment and learning.

RFT I know, but Cicero counterattacked. I

forget the Latin, but Cicero more or less somewhere says "to enjoy, to instruct, and to move." To enjoy is in there. It's part of the

equation of ideal learning.

c But you see, from early on there is an ~DCattempt to make antipodes of learning

and pleasure. There's this suspicion that any- thing that's enjoyable is suspect. I suppose it's some puritan impulse.

RFT I remember a film scholar coming to me and crying on my shoulder,

"They don't take us seriously." I said, "Come on, get on with it. What do you think they think about someone who's doing the history of art through mambo? I mean, come on. Give

yourself a break. Film is constant. Film is."

Dc So did your Cuban and Haitian expe- riences set you up for Africa then?

Did mambo bring you to Nigeria?

RFT Nigeria was inevitable. Mambo: "You will go in that direction," a voy-

age demanding work, and cultural prepara- tion. I was commanded to learn Yoruiba. Sooner or later I had to speak Kikongo. I'm still

sweating out mastering those two languages. Eventually I hope to speak fluently, if I have enough decades left, Ejagham-and all the Cuban African languages.

All of this recalls the work song: Daho- mean dokpwe, Haitian rara (Fig. 4), Haitian kombit. Haiti has been trying to tell us, "You cannot have serious communal labor without the honey, or the nectar, of the call and re- sponse plus the vaccine." So I guess what I really am militating for is scholarship with vaccine. I want to vaccinate-vaccinate scholar-

ship against the old-fashioned Germanic defi- nition of what scholarship is all about, of serious subjects of investigation.

Dc When you went to Nigeria were there any scholarly guides for you? Were

you reading anybody?

RFT By this time I had been reading Herskovits. After I got drafted into

the army, I hung out in Paris with Gilbert Rouget, a French Africanist and ethnomusi-

cologist. The army was beautiful for me because I had the luck of being stationed at

Stuttgart, which was overnight by train from Paris. So even when I was in the army, '56

through '58, it became a proto-fellowship at the Musee de l'Homme. I made a beeline there. I knew what I had to do, and I started

collecting. There was a wonderful place called the B6ite de Musique on Boulevard Raspail where I kept piling up early records: Gilbert Rouget, Andre Didier, early French

recordings of Central African music. On those records, one in particular,

"Babinga," suddenly I began to hear--yyi-- yodelized oscillations pointing back to yodelized train-whistle blues heard in El Paso. It was like one of those computerized screen effects where objects suddenly move into focus. But it necessitated a hell of a lot of read-

ing. I read a lot of Herskovits, Waterman, Merriam. And then I ordered two texts that

changed my life: Steams's The Story of Jazz and Waterman's "African Influence on the Music of the Americas." I was waiting for my copy of The Story of Jazz, which as a GI in Germany I ordered at great distance. And the day it came, I was unwrapping it knowing that this was a full-course text. This soldier next to me said, "Damn, I don't think there's anything nicer than to see a guy open up a package when

you know what's in it means so much to him." I read Richard Alan Waterman. Rare to find

someone who had his lapidary way of phras- ing Afro-Atlantic organizing principles, partic- ularly "off-beat phrasing of melodic accents." And particularly "metronome sense." Some scholars harrumphed, "How do we know there's such a thing as metronome sense?" But of course now it's come out that you must have an inner timeline or you can't tap dance, or

perform a Zulu dance, or play jazz. Those two

PHOTO: DONALD J. COSENTINO

texts; in effect, like mambo, I spent the rest of my life glossing them. Waterman showed the other side of ecstasy. Waterman showed that you could take the full apparatus of serious, ethnomusicological research and address the ecstasies of mambo and Vodou and look at these things through that prism.

The rigor of art history discipline im- mersed me through Kubler's work in general on Amerindian antiquity. But also Richard Alan Waterman, to whom I owe lifelong debt. And DuBois, his respect for the vernac- ular levels: Do not forget a single vernacular democratic impulse-that's what I got out of The Souls of Black Folk. And Maya Deren: Abandon manipulation. Let Haiti roll over you. I got all these lessons. I don't know how they add up in the patchwork. I've rarely dis- cussed that piece of quartz, or piano blues. I keep telling people that mambo did it. But mambo was the final crystallization, when all the forces came together.

DC So then you brought this to the Yo- riibbi, and you were home again.

ET Yes. The Palladium was like a mythic university, Afro-Atlantic U. So that

when I saw a young Yoruiba in the Anago ter-

ritory put his elbow on his drum to get a cer- tain amount of peppery-like essence out of the instrument, this was not an exotic Africanism in southwestern Nigeria. This was something I'd seen the New York Puerto Rican mambo drummer, Ray Baretto, do night after night on the floor of the Palladium. So that if you give one of the first things I wrote, An Aesthetic of the Cool (1966), a close reading, you'll find that what I was really doing was, in essence, gloss- ing what I had learned at that point in Nigeria in terms of Palladium insights.

But, brother, by this time I appreciated the vernacular and street sense. I remember some- one said rather huffily, "Thompson seems wedded to the vulgar notion of the Cool." He was apparently terrified of the street implica- tions of African influence, of the Creole pro- cess of change and African taste, everywhere unfolding. But Christ spoke in a Creole. At the supreme moment, he didn't say in standard Greek or Hebrew, "Oh, God, why hast thou forsaken me?" He spoke in Aramaic, which was a kind of Afro-Asiatic langue vernaculaire. Lord Buddha and Christ were never anti- democratic, never loath to deal with the ver- nacular. I'm really free-wheeling here, but I don't think I was prepared to read the Holy Bible with any resonance or accuracy until I came back and opened King David's Psalms after two and one-half years in Nigeria. His images had laterite on them, as it were, and I'd never noticed. He finally spoke to me.

What I am trying to say is that mambo prepared me for Nigeria; Nigeria prepared me for even more. How to handle religiosity, which is something I am still trying to work out. How to handle it in a way that can get at spirit, and tradition, without any awkward

5. POSSESSION BY GUEDE. HAITI, 1987.

56

phrasing. On the other hand, I am not afraid of awkwardness, either. That's something I learned from studying classic Chinese paint- ing. Tung Ching Chang, in effect, left us all this admonition: "Recapture awkwardness" and avoid manuals of correctness-you are

vulgar the moment you try to mime them; or: "Return to Laterite," i.e., keep your phrasing and your knowledge down to earth.

DC The question I am going to ask you next may now sound naive in light of

what you've already said. From the body of

your published work, I presumed that your interests had moved in a line from discovering the key cultures in Africa to then worrying about, or out, or through, their relationship to African civilizations in the Diaspora. But it seems this vision was there from the begin- ning. The truth is that mambo set your agenda a hell of a long time before any of this was for-

mally worked out.

RFT Of course, Kikongo mambu becomes mambo in Afro-Cuban, a creolization

of mambu. Mambu is plural: many words. I was thrust into argument-mambu-symbolically, spiritually, thematically, literally, figuratively, organically, bodily, modified by every adverb on the planet. I cannot escape what the minkisi and the orisha commanded me to do.

DC Do you equate this experience with Native American initiation experiences

or spiritual issues? Was this a spiritual quest?

RFT That's a thing I'd love to do, compare all this to Amerindia. Unfortunately, I

don't have that many decades. The only sort of extra-African-Atlantic excursus started was in Australia, where I worked last summer because I'm fascinated by Aranda and Walbiri ground paintings, like vev~ and pontos riscados. And tra- ditions where the body, rather than the last medium you think of, is the first medium you think of. Body painting-there before easels and blackboards and electronic media shows. So I think the only extra-Africa thing that I am

going to publish will deal with Afro-Oceanic vernacular response to modernism. And I am

going to take glossy prints of the work of Giacometti and Modigliani and Picasso

among the Fang. I've already done it among a few Bakongo. I'm calling that book Equal Time: Afro-Oceanic Perceptions ofModern Art.

In summer 1991 I took reproductions of Paul Klee's work to the Northern Territory. I spread illustrations out in the sand-certain illustrations rumored to reflect his having seen "aboriginal art" in a Swiss ethnographic muse- um. And I laid it out, but it was familiar in that we were on the sand, seated down, and it was familiar in that I watched them paint before I started the interview, and of course some of it was like Mbuti Pygmy art, communalized dot- ting patterns. Adids, single genius; hello, lin- eage, posse, clan. It's the way break-dancing, swing dancing, the lindy, and capoeira and all these other Afro-phenomena emerged. With- out your brother and sister around you, you're nothing; you cannot do it alone.

6. ARNOLD RUBIN INSIDE A FLOAT AT THE TOURNAMENT OF ROSES PARADE.

PASADENA, CALIFORNIA; JANUARY 1, 1973.

So I asked them, "What do you think about Paul Klee?" And two things a painter said. One, "He is well-caught," meaning that with a

single arrow he caught his form. And two, "He has changed our dreamline, pushed it this way and that, so that snakes and wallabies may hide in them. We don't do that." And I thought, he's

picking up intimations of Western one-point perspective, a European accent in Klee's phras- ing of their forms. It's very complicated. This book will take me years. Right now, it's strictly altars, plus work on Jean-Michel Basquiat, a cat-

alogue essay for the Whitney Museum.

DC When you began your work with Yo- ruba" material culture, you were al-

ready looking at these objects with a context in mind?

RFT Yes. I had seen Yoruibb Americans in 1952 and 1959 without really know-

ing they were Yoribai Americans. At Lucumi ceremonies in Havana I saw them ventilate their blouses with thumb and forefingers. It seemed to me such a wonderful counter-song, and I wrote it down: "They are tugging on their shirts, against the off-beat." At the Palladium in 1959, I saw Puerto Ricans tug on their jackets or their sleeves to the off-beat. Then, when I came to Nigeria and saw the

way they activate their dress, I saw a root, a constant state of sartorial epiphany. Yoribba wear their robes and buba in constant adjust- ment, whereas broadloom tailored cloths commit one to a kind of frozen presence.

D C You've heard this referred to as "one

D.Jthousand-five hundred?"

R F Yeah, I loved that. So, it was literally seamless. Now there are some, often

bureaucrats, who will say, snidely, "We're not sure that there is such a thing as a Kongo- Atlantic world or a Yoruiba-Atlantic culture." As we say in Nigeria, "Let dem say." Demo-

graphic numbers alone are catching up with them. We all get discouraged and we're humiliated from time to time. But the culture's there, not only to keep us going but as auto- matic medicine. As the Bakongo say, "Where

you find humiliation, there also you find the

ground of grandeur." The grandeur of this is that we're all privileged: Karen McCarthy Brown and Renbe Stout-the list is endless, but we're all privileged to be standing in an age where the persons of color and Latinos are becoming an overwhelming cultural presence.

DC This may be the right time for a ques- tion I've wanted to ask you about

Amrnold Rubin. Shortly before he died, the Los Angeles Times published a long interview with Amrnold, in which he used a line that res- onated from Easy Rider. In substance Amrnold said, "We lost it." Near the end of the movie, after they take their long trip, the Fonda char-

1 LL 0 I

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acter turns to Hopper, who is very excited after this big drug deal they just carried off, and says, "We lost it." In a sense Arnold said the same thing about African art history. He

explained that when he began his study of African art, he had a certain vision of getting in on a discipline that was new, that was

studying historically neglected cultures in new ways. It was a study that promised to break new ground. But somewhere along the line, this study of African art history lost its nerve. It became conventional. Granted that these were the words of a dying man, do his sentiments resonate for you?

R fI will wholeheartedly address that. First of all, Arnold was a genius. Sec-

ondly, he had the wit and the bravery to go down a Los Angeles street inside a float (Fig. 6). And a float, in the African-American argot of the '40s, meant anything that was automo- tive, but primarily automobiles: "I got me a nice float." Of course, that has resonance in rara and street parades and so forth. But he fit into vernacular happenings very easily, and we only got a tiny part of what he had. But when he said "We lost it," yeah-in a sense it's true. I see a lot of jealousy masquerading as criticism. I see a lot of careerists who've lost the excitement. In a larger Kongo-Atlantic sense of wheeling, he was accurately depicting a moment of over-bureaucratized, over-mono-

graphic night that is simply a moment before another day. And then we get too elegant again. In a way, he reminds me of Tung Ching Chang, whom I talked about earlier.

This is important, and I'm glad you asked it. To regain momentum, What is our method-

ology? Certainly not a standardized African- Atlantic Notes and Queries to further the work of those in need of crutches, paraphrases, and shortcuts. To me, Afro-Atlantic methodology is by artistic example. Study and absorb Coltrane, don't ask him how he did it. Paint Kline or the Saars (Figs. 1, 7) until you become

57

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yourself, until emergent identity makes all these influences move for you.

Read everything possible, learning the vernacular (Tshi-Luba, Bamana-Kan, ede Yori'bi). Then submit the translating power gained thereby to everything else. For Afro- Atlantic art history begins and ends with

translating. I remember a graduate student

lousy in French, which was a blessing. It forced him into Bamana-Kan, and now he's one of the richest minds of our discipline. I have a very serious commitment to linguis- tics. In a sense, if I am an ethnomusicologist manqud, I'm even more a would-be linguist.

7. GRIS GRIS BOX BY BETYE SAAR. UNITED STATES, 1972. WALL ASSEMBLAGE; 43cm x 22cm x 7cm. COLLECTION OF THE ARTIST.

But, on the other hand, in the possession sequence, when that too will be casse, all our

arrogant prescriptions, our "We know how to

analyze this" kind of arrogance, run up against the glass wall of possession. And we have to understand what Borges said (and what richness, I would give my eyeteeth to have a fifteenth of his mind). But imagine the wholeness that Borges confronted in another Afro-Atlantic expression, the tango. And if

Borges can admit what he admitted-he said that the tango is important, and we do argue about it as we do argue about all things that are important, but there is a mystery in it- then we allow for the intuitive and immea- surable in awon dre YorTba' as well. So I honor Arnold by saying, "Yes, we've lost it at one level, only to regain it at another level, only to lose it at that level, only to regain it at another level, only to lose it at another level-until

finally, by the middle of the twenty-first cen-

tury, there may be so many people involved in Afro-Atlantic studies, openly and with love, that many older problems of racism and reverse racism hopefully will dissolve."

Think of John Coltrane, in the age of Watts, in the middle of the '60s, creating argu- ments almost wholly based on love. As a self- critical instrument. Coltrane's jazz was one

example, an incredible comfort. And Levi- Strauss's La pensde sauvage is another text that forever shaped me. It was like a vindication. Levi-Strauss, by example, is suggesting- since he spoke French, Hebrew, and who knows how many other languages, including flawless, unaccented English-that the

ground zero of rigor is multilingualism. So that you can acquire the multilingual habit, begin to role-switch, and maybe you'll see the West and Africa as equal cultural potencies.

D C Your words remind me of comments Camille Paglia made recently in the

New York Times. Apropos of Euro-American culture history, she observed that before you began to talk about one aspect of that histo-

ry, you had to know the entire history. And what I'm hearing right now is that you don't

pick out an aspect of Black Atlantic tradition without at least a willingness to engage yourself in the entire tradition. Hell, you've got to be a goddamn good scholar to deal with this. You've got to be a good linguist. You've got to be a historian. You've got to know a lot of stuff.

RF Yes, we've got to work our asses off. One of my heroes is Mazlo and his

theory of the self-actualizing person. If there's anything that Afro-Atlantic culture says, at one level, it's what he suggests when he talks about how spontaneous persons like Katherine Dunham, Wole Soyinka, and Ogin make won- derful things happen to them through hard work. Take the folk energy put into the analy-

58

sis of walking: a good walk, a bad walk, a mediocre walk, a superlative walk, the Chal- lenge Walk in Jamaica, Boppin' of a certain decade in Harlem-these processes come from incredible amounts of analytic work. From mother to daughter to granddaughter. To tap these vital self-analytic currents of analysis and affirmation, the African-Americanist or the Afro-Atlanticist or the Africanist has to work harder than someone, I would imagine, who is studying within the assumed received tradi- tion. Now, if you allow me, can I say one thing that is arrogant?

DC Please.

RFTI think that Renaissance art history, compared to Yoruba art history, is

easier. The research will be conducted in an Indo-European language and a historical con- text lauded since your childhood. You know something about Michelangelo already. Whereas if you are going to study Turkana beadworking, you have to learn Turkana. You have to study patterns in provinces all around that area. You can't just go and read the vestry minutes of the Duomo. You've got to go out there and sweat out the puzzle in the middle of East Africa. Our work is harder. We have to read a double, maybe triple literature. You can't just read art history. You've got to read anthropology. And you can't just speak Eng- lish. You've got to speak Mande-Kan or Creole. You've got to put yourself on the line where race, class, society, and culture intersect and not feel sorry for yourself when at first you fail and fail. As Paula Ben-Amos taught me, hit the witch-bird on the beak and get on with it.

The real problem is, do we have time enough to get at the nihilism-the collapse of civic attentions that has gone on in this coun- try, where blacks are allowed to sink into poverty and shoot each other-drug wars-- while the rest of America commutes indiffer- ently to the suburbs? Nihilism burns in the midst of all this idealism that I am talking about. And it has to be addressed. That's why I pray that we not be distracted by, or con- cerned too much about, how well our profes- sion is doing. We have more important things to do. And remember Marianne Moore- there's another person who shaped me-who wrote, "Concern about how well the work is going mildews one's effectiveness." To contin- ue a paraphrase of her words: "Too much cau- tion about how our profession is doing will spoil the lion's leap." She used a feline metaphor, appropriate to our world. So that, with all due respect, I don't have time at the moment to worry about certain niceties. I see this urgency to get the information out on the parallel validity of the Afro-Atlantic tradition. To get it written, and on video, and film, everything--quickly, because certain lines may intersect if we don't, and mean-spirited forces, here and abroad, are already marshalling.

DC You opened the door on political implications, which I want to push a

little bit further. I share with you a sense--

and not only a sense, since it's obvious from opening the newspapers-that these argu- ments are not abstractions. They're no longer theoretical arguments about multicultural- ism, and about reshaping canons, and about somehow recognizing that this country isn't really an extension of Europe. They're some- thing rather more interesting than that. They now go to the heart of American politics: what we are or are not going to become.

RFT Our discipline's in the middle of the politics of the twenty-first century.

DC Maybe this interview is part of the process of calling things what they

are. Politics are very important now, and have been for a long time, haven't they, in the context of art historical studies?

R I would hope that as Coltrane helped li blacks get through the '60s, with the

love pouring out of his horn, we African- Atlanticists, through the love of the discipline, pushing us to ever harder work, will generate something that will dissolve stasis and manip- ulation in favor of forces appropriate to what is really happening now, the emergence of the world's first truly universal nation: Asian, Latino, Native American, African, Caribbean, East European, West European. The glory and the pressure of America today is demographic alchemy, with all the responsibilities all that mixing, all that clashing, presupposes. And if the kombit teaches us that if you've got this enormous amount of hoeing to be done, the hoeing will go better with a little pleasure, a little tafia together with vaccines.

Yes, I am political if it is a political state- ment to say that African-Atlantic culture is fully self-possessed, an alternative classical tradition; that one studies Mbanza Kongo, Ile-Ife, and Kangaba as one might study Carthage, Jerusalem, Rome, and Athens. But I'm saying more than that. I'm saying that it is just as good. I'm also saying, since it con- stantly comes back to what is the vernacular answer, in my study of mambo I came across a text built around the life of a Puerto Rican in New York, Benjy L6pez, whom I would call a mambo man. And what is a mambo man, and what is a mambo woman, but a person who lives in a cultural bouillabaisse, who learns from being buffeted by pressures white, black, and brown--how to deal, how to find the radium, as Madame Curie did. Benjy L6pez learned from being up against the max in Anglo-Saxon New York City, as a boricua [Puerto Rican] learns how to deal. And how do you deal? By "feeling inferior to no one, but feeling superior to no one either." iQud ecuaci6n, mano!

So that is my politics and my methodolo- gy, in a single phrase. I would hope somehow, and I'm not there yet, to impart a prose and an example equal to his walloping words. And this ambition leads to another problem, Donald. Another thing that pisses me off. The whole idea of scholars reified with ageism. I am supposed to be a "senior scholar." Hell, I haven't even begun. All my works are pro-

logue, mere preparation. Afro-Atlantic re- search should promulgate a kind of moral rhythm that imparts in the students, practi- tioners, and teachers alike one central insight: that we've become sufficient enough to feel inferior to no one, but we've become multicul- tural enough to feel superior to no one, either. Does that make sense to you?

DC I'm going to push that a little bit. Cer- tain words have become associated

with work you've done, at least lately. You use the word "guerrilla." You talk about your- self sometimes, in some contexts, as a guerrilla scholar, or as doing guerrilla scholarship. Talk about that.

SFT I mean what I say. Flight from any- IIIIthing that would freeze and pinpoint and, therefore, make targetable our discipline. This is a forager's insight. This is the insight of blacks in football who taught the Anglo- Saxons how to stutter-step. If you're running zigzag, you're harder to catch. So, by guerrilla scholar, I mean just that. Like the Haitian Maroons moving on the spine of the morne, and coming down and dealing with Napo- leon's forces and then disappearing into the mists. I want to keep moving. That's why gypsy music moved me, because following this scene has certainly turned me gypsy. I mean a kind of self-imposed nomadism that's part of the discipline and part of the work. A guerrilla scholar must move in many worlds and must honor the speakers of that world in their own speech. Otherwise, we're doing the fox trot by mail.

SApropos of your observation on the DC. importance of speaking the vernacu- lar, Levi-Strauss said the invention of the subjunctive in languages was an intellectual feat at about the same level of abstraction, and singular brilliance, as the discovery of relativity. And probably about as many peo- ple actually know how to use the subjunctive well as can use Einsteinian theory well.

RFT Right. I have a French tape I'm pounding into myself. First it gives

you standard French, and then street French, which they call branch'--"plugged in." Instead of saying "When has all that happened?" it just says "Quand ga?"-"When that?"-it's almost like Creole. Actually, metropolitan French, Parisian French, whether it knows it or not, is beginning to wheel in that direction because of the influence of so many Antillais in Paris. The very core of metropolitan Europe now becomes transformed, with thou- sands of Surinamese in Amsterdam, Jamai- cans in London-but we're getting away from your question.

DC Not really. My question was on some- .J thing I know you don't want to pin

down, which is field methodology.

RFT Well, I can talk about it.

One of the things Herskovits wrote was "Be

seen." Doing fieldwork is being active, not a

59

8. SWORD HANDLE. KONGO, ZAIRE. FORGED IRON, LEATHER, BRASS; 22.2cm.

JEROME L. JOSS COLLECTION, UCLA FOWLER MUSEUM OF CULTURAL

HISTORY, X87-620.

THE FIGURE'S POSE IS ALSO FOUND IN NEW WORLD CULTURES; IN HAITI IT IS

CALLED "LA POSITION CONGO."

wallflower. If you sit down alone you com- municate "I'm tired," so you are out of it. Unless, of course, it is a situation where being seated is an honor or the proper level, a pro- tocol of respect. So you move constantly, see-

ing and being seen. And, secondly, be unafraid to commit mis-

takes. Mistakes are creative. Sometimes they award you nicknames, which in turn make

you a little more human. People without nick- names are somehow less human than those who have them. I was known in one Yoriibai village as the man who misused the verb bi "to be born" (high tone), because I hit it with a low tone, bi. I thought I was praising the birth of a child, but actually I was alluding to an infant being "puked up." Lots of laughter about that. A lot of methodology is common sense, acquired toughness. Allow them to break your balls, if I can put it in straight ver- nacular. And take energy from that.

DC And go with the flow.

RFT And realize that some of the advice

you get from anthropologists and

sociologists who went into the field is some- times off the wall. Like that bit of lofty advice, "Wear tennis shoes so that when you walk through the creeks of Nigeria the water will not ruin your shoes," as if this were some kind of grand insight. You can wear

any kind of goddamn shoes you want. But

Nigel Barley, now there's a model for you. Nigel's my favorite writer, in terms of decon-

structing fieldwork.

DC Oh, Adventures in a Mud Hut? Yes, I've been there. I've been in that hut. I've

had that toothache.

FT Basic field technique may include throwing your clock away. If you're

the kind of person who takes it personally when informants contracted to show up at 2:15 p.m. show up two days later, you should

go into selling stocks and bonds.

DC I want to talk to you about the role of evidence in your work. Because you

do have an enormous agenda that has been

developing for a long time. And so in a sense you carry an agenda as well as let the field set one for you. I mean, you're looking for the Afro-Atlantic Leonardo, or whoever the Leonardo equivalent is. How do you deal with the search for evidence? Or the role of evidence?

RFT Linguistically and consensually. If one person says it, that's interesting,

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but if you begin to get reverberations and rep- etitions of a given point, then it seems to me, that you're touching evidence. There is a

problem here, and it is a very serious one. Are the generalizations transcendental? And if so, are they therefore meaningless at the moment

they're proved to be transcendental? Or, are we seeking hard-core, self-repeating, self-

referring lines of performance that identify a culture, so that no matter where you are with- in that culture, the gravy may be poured dif-

ferently, the greens may be tossed a different

way, but the core diet remains in place. The

yams and peppers and the black-eyed peas. Richard Alan Waterman's traits, emended by a few more, seem to me metallically resistant, enduring, analytic units that we can use to

compare one side of the Atlantic with the other. And then try, as best we can, with

enough evidence, for equivalences in dress, in food, and so forth.

But let's take the Bakongo. When I talk about "left hand on hip" and "right hand for- ward" and declare this as a Kongo pose (Fig. 8), how can I do this? What is my evidence? Well, the fact that in Haiti it is called "la posi- tion Congo" is one hint. The fact that it turns

up among the Congo societies in Panamai fre-

quently. The fact that it is very strong in the

Kongo-influenced religion called Palo

Mayombe in Cuba. On one level you could

say it was a universal, but not quite. Put it this

way: "la position Congo," together with arms akimbo, correlates with aggression, starting things, wherever the Bakongo were brought to the New World, and has spilled out

through creolization into larger areas. But I am still seeking further evidence for it. I bor- rowed, also, evidence from William Stewart and other scholars who have been looking at African-derived gestures in the New World with much greater attention than I have. He and some other scholars, notably John Szwed, gave me the guts to go forward with that.

Numbers are evidence. If we know that 70% of black South Carolina at a certain time was Kongo-Angola in origin, that is an impor- tant point of scholarly entry. I cannot start

studying something unless I have a good feel-

ing about numbers. And I would never com-

pare an African item with another item in the New World out of context of known prepon- derance of numbers. There are some people, particularly those who have problems with art history anyway, who say, "What are you doing, putting one slide against another? How facile is this comparison?" But I can only say, as God is my witness, that there is sweat and blood on every slide.

To repeat, to me data turn to evidence under democratic pressure, transmuting idiosyncratic brass to metals of consensus. Is the fact that a woman in Detroit puts a lot of tires in front of her house, is that idiosyncrat- ic? Some would want you to believe that. Some would even insult her by calling it an outsider work. An outsider environment no less. But the fact is Henry Dorsey did that in

Kentucky, Lonnie Holley in Alabama. Some- one's doing it in Mississippi. Someone's

doing it in New Jersey. Someone's doing it on a Sea Island. In Virginia, in Texas, Lou- isiana, black Paraguay. Suddenly, there's this thunderous echoing, but that consensual thunder has to be re-alchemized, as it were, all over again, until we have object histories

richly attesting to not only Kongo impulses but all the private, adventitious influences

flowing in from everywhere in today's America (Figs. 9, 10).

D C But there's no evidence machine. Part

L.D of this is going to have to be intuition or a hunch.

RFT Of course, there is no evidence ma- chine. And I think that's what people

want out of me at one level. But the machinery plugs into intuition and the spirit, and that's very hard for people to comprehend.

When I saw Henry Dorsey's work, even as late as 1974, I saw a solitary, synthesizing genius. I didn't realize at the time that there were hundreds of Henry Dorseys. Judy McWillie set me right on that, and Grey Gundaker has gone from the Carolinas to Texas and back again. Her findings, which are very important, get us back to evidence. Not all African Americans are doing this. Like many Czech Americans are not that wedded now to Czech culture. But if Czechness as

60

such is worth something, and it is, someone will take it upon herself or himself to be a kind of guardian or sentinel, so that being Czech does not totally disappear in North America. By the same token, in just about

every major American city there is at least one

person, self-appointed or spiritually activat- ed-I don't know how to characterize it yet- who, through the objects that are reiterated in the yard show, does this. Now, someone will

say, "That is only one person." Well, I would

say, "So what? There was only one Donatello. There was only one Brunelleschi. Do we have more masters at a given time in Florence than we have digits on our hand? Do we really have to have all of North Italy involved?" You see, that's another way of being unfair. We Westerners can get away with a handful of artists, but you have to show that everyone's doing it. Come on.

DC When I wrote about Mende aesthetics, I knew there were those who would

object to my description of aesthetic systems that weren't packaged and presented to me

by Mende informants. And I responded that there was only one Aristotle in fifth-century Greece. It would have been easy for a field- worker not to find him. But not finding him wouldn't have meant that the Greeks didn't have a sense of the aesthetics or didn't see a

system in their art. It's an absurd argument, actually. To worry about numbers in terms of

enunciating systems.

RFT Well, it's like that incredible line in Risky Business when Tom Cruise

asks Rebecca de Mornay,"Do you love me?" And she says, "Yes. No. Maybe." I thought, what an Afro-Atlantic answer. Yes: we must use numbers and buttress our findings with as many documentable cases as possible so that we can show a clear consensus. On the

PHOTO GREY GUNDAKER

other hand, no: if that means we must give up intuition and sensing the third leg of a trian-

gle two-thirds already visible. And the maybe is, perhaps one ideal day the intuitive and the

empirical will be so fused that we won't even have this stupid argument anymore.

rD I suppose it's a truism to say to you DL. that you have multiple audiences.

Perhaps that's a problem that you have to deal with more than anybody else in the field?

RFT Not at all. I mean, there are always going to be some people in a lectur-

ing audience, no matter what one says, who will either not like or not get it, but again, you have to be tough or jump into another profes- sion. But I glory in audiences that have some

doubting businessmen who are dragged in

just because their wives do curating or docent work. They'd rather be watching foot- ball. They're ours, or will be, because the

reshaping of American sports by Kongo- Atlantic, Kongo-Angolan, plus other African traditions and philosophies is a chapter which happens to be instantly recognizable.

I think that while teachers are still rub-

bing their hands together wondering how we can reach students, black America is involved in one of the greatest poetic upsurges since

Shakespeare. And if rap is not rhythmized rhyme, what is it? And if Alexander Pope is not rhythmized thought, what is it? So, here are two things, football and rap, that are

waiting-automatic vehicles-for the teacher. I glory in heterogeneous audiences. The more mix, the better.

D•C I'm talking about writing as well as Ld speaking.

R FT Yeah, well, that too. When I wrote for Rolling Stone two times I suppose

certain conventional scholars rolled their eyes, proclaiming, "Good God!" But I reached far-

flung audiences. I reached a serious, young African-Americanist colleague in Australia who was privy to rich, obscure documents of black dancing in the markets of New York for three decades in the early nineteenth century that I would never have known about. And that is why I wrote that article, but I didn't realize it. Plus the fact that they had excellent

photographers who were able to photograph stills from a precious Kinetoscope of blacks

dancing ca. 1895-1905, attributed to Edison. (We still don't know if it's his.) I was able to use duplicates to study and teach with forever after. I doubt I would have reached this data without this assignment.

It doesn't mean that I am not eventually going to do a love article for the Art Bulletin, a love project several years off. It will be a careful, traditional biography of Oginni, the artist who did the famous brass doors in Ilesha. His son and I became close friends and he shared incredible data. What I'm try- ing to say is that the fact that I have done this article in Rolling Stone does not presuppose that I am not going to write in Artforum. On the contrary, in fact I have a de facto column in Artforum. Two articles in Rolling Stone, but three in Artforum, and three traditional art

history catalogues in the past three years. It's

ridiculously defensive for me even to justify.

" • I've got a related question, which D Cshould be fun. I have wandered into the consulting or altar room of very few botdni- cas where I have not discovered a small library of reference texts kept by the santero. And that

PHOTO: ROBERT FARRIS THOMPSON

9. GRAVESTONE WITH KONGO IMAGERY. MARION COUNTY, MISSISSIPPI, 1991.

10. KONGO GRAVE, JULY 1990.

61

backroom literature would often include two titles: Bascom's Ifa Divination and, if the botdni- ca is lucky enough (this book is very much desired but hard to come by), Black Gods and

Kings. Some santeros I know own a copy of Flash of the Spirit and regard it almost as a sacred text. So, I would like you to evaluate the prophetic or validating role your books

play in contemporary African-Atlantic ritual.

RFT Oh, brother.

DC You must be aware of that?

RFT I'm embarrassed.

c Not to embarrass you further, it's sim- lDCply a fact that up until Herskovits, Bascom, and then you, this subject of an African-Atlantic art/ritual continuum hadn't been treated in a serious, scholarly way. Your work now opens doors. I am thinking in par- ticular of Cuban santeros for whom the con- nection between Yoruiba Cuba and Yoruiba

Nigeria is essentially theological. It's a ques- tion of the apostolic succession. And you now

present them with material which allows for a serious discussion in a serious way.

RFT Well, to the extent that they know that the love of their faith transcends

disciplines from the street to academe and back again, that makes me one happy animal. But I would not want to think that this would make me seem to be some great priest, over-

seeing. Because that would embarrass me.

D But Bob, we all face that risk when we go to a village. We become fetishized.

We become objectified as anybody would. Once your work is out of your hands, there is

nothing you can do about it. And one result of

your work is the filling of a real hunger inside, in this particular case, the Santeria community. You are providing missing data for a lot of

people who need that data for reasons which

you may or may not choose to be associated with. That simply is an observable fact to those who do research in that area. Bascom is dead, so you're the one who has got to deal with this.

RFT Well, as for Bascom...David Brown, who is working at Emory, gave me

an appropriate Latino term, recopilacidn, and Bascom's work is at the center of that.

Recopilacidn, a regathering and comparing of sacred texts, something like this: "This much of Ifi we got from our grandfather. And we will strike it against this much of Bascom, and this much of Cosentino, and this much of x and y until the full truth now emerges. How wonderful that there are texts out there that they can strike against the oral tradition. And this enhanced tradition becomes a

greater and greater energy. But I wasn't aware that was going on in that many botdni- cas. In fact I've never seen a botdnica selling my stuff. So I didn't know.

DC No, this isn't in the shop; this is in the consulting room. Maybe this is an

L.A. phenomenon. But then you must always be aware that L.A. is one step ahead of every place else in the United States, especially in

theological matters.

R FT iClaro, mano, claro estd!

DC Talk of santeros brings me to some- thing that you alluded to at the begin-

ning of this talk which will probably embarrass you again. But I'm going to ask it

anyway. Is there a religious or philosophical message in your work?

RFT Yes.

D C Is there a god or gods that you are lDU searching for or slouching toward?

RFT Again, let me cite LCvi-Strauss's Il famous pages on the traditionalists' fusion of the synchronic and diachronic, the

subjective with the objective. And that the two of them are as one. Because it might seem to a lot of people trained in a certain way that to

profess this as a religious level automatically vaporizes the all-prized distancing, automati-

cally rips off the melancholy mask of objectivi- ty. And I would answer that in two ways. One of my heroines in writing remains forever

Djuna Barnes. When I was sweating out learn-

ing French in Paris in 1955, I also read

Nightwood. And I knew this woman was pow- erful, because she had T. S. Eliot's endorse- ment, and T. S. didn't endorse too many people. So I read her. I didn't realize it at the moment, because that was in 1955, but her

prose read like Kongo ideographs. Her prose read like Ifi Odzi, in one-liners like "deer-hoof raised, in the economy of fear," or "the obstet- ric line that is shared between a pear and a

PHOTO GERARDO MOSQUERA

woman come to term." I quote her all the time. And I did an hommage to her that I hoped someone would notice, and no one ever did, in African Art in Motion. Anyway, in her novel she has a passage in which a person hears a lover approaching. And by chimes of objects on a dresser, like the particular echo of the lover's footsteps in the hall, the person knows that her lover is coming; she knows that her lover, not someone else, is there. Love pushed that person into the ultimate objectivity, such that just two steps or two moves overheard

instantly become a hologram of presence. This to me is an example of how love, and

also religious passion as an aspect of love, far from destroying objectivity, can push us to an

objectivity beyond all academic understand- ing. Although we might have a hint if we

study the writings of Heidegger or Paul Tillich. You understand what's going on here? It's yet another example of the conven- tional West saying, "We can do it but you can't." Paul Tillich can be a practitioner of his religion, which he was, yet people will take what he says seriously as a scholar. So there should be no problem. An Afro-Atlantic per- son who, as I am, is a member of the Yoruiba religion through the worship of Erinle, or a member of the Kongo religion through initia- tion into Mayomb6 in Havana (Fig. 11), or a member of the Leopard society through initi- ation in Cameroon (Fig. 12), can participate and write art history from within that knowl-

edge, as Rheinhold Niebuhr did, as Jewish historians of Jewish art have and will.

DC Have you been initiated into Vodou?

RFT No, not yet. But, yes, in Nigeria I am an olorisha. A minor one. To go back

to your argument about evidence, if you are

going to deal with the liturgy, it could be done, I suppose, as a nonbeliever, but under extreme difficulty. One could crack certain codes, supply certain grammars. But it was not until I had been initiated into the religion of Erinle, received my two stones and received a lot of other things, that Abatan took me seriously as a colleague, as opposed to this strange white boy who came, with

amusing insistence, to her door year in, year out, 1962-1966. Although, grande dame that she was, she understood at once that my wanting to interview her was a compliment. That I understood how important she was. But after I was initiated, my name changed and my sources multiplied. First I was oyinbo: white person. Then I was known as oyinbo Abatan (Abatan's white person). But after ini- tiation they called me omo Abatan (Abatan's child) and put me officially under her wing. For now she was my iya olorisha.

If I enter a shrine, and it is known that I am initiated through the gossip lines-and

11. THOMPSON AND A FELLOW CANDIDATE KNEEL DURING PENITENCIA, THE FIRST PHASE OF INITIATION INTO KONGO PRIESTHOOD IN CUBA. THEIR BACKS ARE GUARDED BY CREOLIZED KONGO IDEOGRAPHS. HAVANA, AUGUST 1988.

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12. INITIATION OF ROBERT FARRIS THOMPSON INTO THE SECOND GRADE OF THE BASINJOM SOCIETY AMONG THE BANYANG PEOPLE OF CAMEROON.

THE PRIEST ADMINISTERS EYEDROPS OF AFRICAN TULIP TREE MEDICINE, WHICH ENHANCES VISION INTO THE OTHER WORLD. THE POSTULANT THEN WIPES

HIS EYES WITH THE SHARP EDGE OF HIS MATCHET. DEFANG AREA, MARCH 1973.

you know from working in Haiti that you don't have to say, they already know-the conversation starts at a certain level im-

mediately, which makes fieldwork more felicitous. So what would I suggest to field- workers? I would say that if you are afraid to take that final leap, perhaps it won't wreck

your line of evidence gathering. It might be

possible to emerge as a Turner, or a Boas. But I'd rather, if I could ever earn it, be more a Rheinhold Niebuhr, you know, than a Boas. And if that sounds terribly arrogant, just let her rip, as long as you realize that I am as sensitive to how pretentious that might sound to you, or a reader. But Eshu will even matters out, if necessary.

DC You have elegantly covered your ass.

FT Here's another liberating thing I live by. James Joyce. Someone once said

in the middle of his speech, "Mr. Joyce, with all due respect, you are a son-of-a-bitch." And Joyce said, "That, too."

Now I live by that in this sense, the "that, too" syndrome: "Oh, so you are a drummer"; that, too. "So you are a performer"; that, too.

Or, "You teach art history?" That, too. Con-

fidently we add on roles the way that many African performers do. The way Mama Lola

unself-consciously placed the present she got from Karen McCarthy Brown on her altar the

very next week. Take our cues from vernacu- lar happening.

D•C Do you concern yourself in theory

.DU wars? Do they interest you?

RFT They do. I'm not a postmodernist, though, and explained why in

Artforum this year. Postmodern to me means

post-black. I would rather think of myself as a kind of Afro-structuralist, redirecting into our own discipline liberating, democratizing vapors from La pensde sauvage and other sources, like Karen McCarthy Brown's in- credible Ph.D. on veve. I learned a lot from Levi-Strauss's viewing of the Aranda and the Walbiri as dandies.

DC His use of "dandy" has stuck forever D in my mind.

RFT Well, I would hope to live by it. To show the dandy hidden in the rags

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of Haiti. To show rich minds in tap-taps. If

you take a purely materialist view, you cannot see anything but misery. Maya Deren said to

young Huxley coming in, "I don't think you should go. You'd only laugh at their misery." Remember? It's in Les invisibles.

We've moved around quite a bit. I hope all this really cuts into some of your central

questions.

DC I'm wondering what I've missed. Were you expecting a line that I didn't give

to you?

RFT Well, maybe to wish, for one last time, that Africanists and Afro-

Americanists and Europeanists and Asianists will ultimately meet in humorous recognition of our common predicaments, our common

superiorities. Lotta problems, lotta work ahead. We are, as Ralph Linton said, anthro-

poid apes trying to live like termites.

DC I heard that. Thanks for the words...

RFT That's cool.

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