The Psychology of Fear

Jul 19, 2020 Book Review…, News

Book Review…

Book: Obeah, Race and Racism – Caribbean Witchcraft in the English Imagination
Author: Eugenia O’Neal
Critic: Glenville Ashby, PhD

Eugenia O’Neal’s ‘Obeah, Race and Racism’ is a scholarly work that resonates on multiple levels. As a historical and sociological blueprint on colonization, it is unparalleled. Moreover, it invites dialogue on the psychology of colonial culture, in particular, neurocitism.
In a cultural zeitgeist marked by race and racism, a mysterious phenomenon called Obeah, joins the main actors – blacks and whites – by the hip in a vortex of illusion and psychic annihilation. Not that the efficacy of Obeah is called into question. That is hardly the author’s intention. What we garner, though, is that Obeah is as powerful as it is allowed to be. And in these colonized lands, every inhabitant has given it carte blanche to trample reason and sound judgment. O’Neil speaks to man’s primal fear of death, his grasp to control the uncontrollable, and to his vulnerability that ultimately leads to his tragic fall.
Obeah, a magical act is vilified and feared by blacks and whites, its mysteries even seizing the imagination of magistrates, botanists and writers. For many, Obeah is a portentous practice, its potential to maim and kill the unsuspected very real. Alarmingly, “it became so closely associated with poisoning that many whites as well as blacks could hardly sleep for fear.”
Of the origins of the term and practice, European writers turned to mythologies surrounding the wiles of the serpent, the archenemy of God. The spectre of this art does not breed racism or hatred in whites alone. The Obeah men and women wield unbridled power over fellow blacks. White racism, though, is writ large in the portrayal of Obeah in law and literature.
In their uneasy romance with this ‘dark’ practice, whites must rationalize their superstitious beliefs to avoid ego fragmentation. Obeah, and by extension, myalism, is seen as a handiwork of the Devil, a scourge that must be eradicated through the salvific value of Christianity. But proselytizing presented its own unique challenges. We read that “As the missionaries made incursions into the slave communities and the number of their converts grew, some of these practices began to take on a uniquely West Indian character that hinges on the perceived magic of the Bible.”
One Jesuit priest wrote of the obeah man’s Faustian pact; that “they take themselves seriously and weave their spells and utter their invocations to Massa Debbil without disguise, placing their unbounded confidence in him as their chief reliance, and continuing on this phase of demonolatry that has come down in direct descent from their forebears, the servants of Sasabonsan back in Ashantiland.”
Paradoxically, such critics solicited the very mavens of this devilish art to attenuate the taxations of daily life.
Obeah men were wizards, dominating nature and all that stood in their way. They were “able to stop the mouths of the prosecution and his witnesses” and were capable “of influencing the judge and jury.” They were adept in withering their enemies, their knowledge and application of poisons stupendous.
O’Neil cites the work of Edward Long who wrote that “Obeah men frequently accomplished their object by administering poison, as by working on the imaginations of their intended victims; and they have attained to so much skill in his deadly trade that the negro affected is seldom able to ascribe his malady to the proper cause.”
Obeah women, conversely, were less pernicious preferring to pedal their mantic wiles in affairs of the heart.
While neither slave nor obeah men and women recorded their lives, literature and periodicals filled in the gaping void, many anonymously inked and riddled with sophistries and hysterical figments that formed a larger construct on race and aesthetics. “I put obeah ‘pon you!’ – that is the worst threat that can be made to a West Indian negro,” appeared in one publication.
Of their physical appearance, they might as well have been shrouded with habiliments from the grave. There is dread. “Obeah men carried sticks, Negro- conjurers, or Obia-men, as they are called, carry about them a staff, which is marked with frogs and snakes…or the rude likeness of a human head carved round the handle.”
In ‘Hamel, the Obeah Man, ’the author speaks of black lust for white women and the support of slavery by the very enslaved. There is the case of an obeah man, a slave, “so grateful to a white man for removing him from his servitude to another black man that he undermined a slave rebellion.”
And there were warring factions, each versed in the occult, one neutralizing the maliciousness wrought by the other, as exemplified in the case of Quassie, a Surinamese slave “who learned the medicinal purposes of the plant that now bears his name from the Amerindians.” Quassie, we learn, became a lukuman (a sorcerer) who put his services at the disposal of the whites in detecting and capturing those who practised the wisi, or black magic…” Quassie “was so successful at this and so esteemed by the whites that in 1730 the Court of Policy awarded him a golden plaque inscribed “Quassie, loyal to the whites.”
And while conjure or rootwork is extolled as effectively combating disease and ailment, the practitioner remains a dimwit, an unworthy primitive.
It was Long who reported on the conjurer’s application of a variety of what he calls ‘medicaments’- “lime juice, cardamoms, the roots, branches, leaves, bark and gums of trees and about different herbs.” But he notes that the Negro “generally apply them randomly, without theory,” in other words, without the scientific calculation characteristic of whites.
In the vein of Fanon, O’Neil’s treatise unmistakably demonstrates that hate is not born, but cultivated overtime, until it devours the very cultivator. ‘Obeah, Race and Racism,’ while laying bare the horrors of enslavement, ever so deeply forays into the recesses of the wounded self.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)
Feedback: [email protected] or follow him on Twitter@glenvilleashby/www.glenvilleashby.com
Obeah, Race and Racism – Caribbean Witchcraft the English Imagination by Eugenia O’Neal
Copyright 2020 by Eugenia O’Neal
Publisher: UWI Press, Mona, Jamaica
ISBN: 978-976-640-759-9
Available at Amazon
Ratings: Essential