Hosay Trinidad. Frank J. Korom
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spirit that go into the making of the objects of veneration. At the same time, I want to address how these expressive practices are connected to contested social issues surrounding ethnic identity formation and the undying importance of racial relations in a nation-state still in the process of defining itself and its national culture. I hope that one of the major contributions of this study will be my interpretation of interethnic dialogue, cultural change, and religious persistence over centuries of historical interaction. On the theoretical level, I reflexively engage in an extended discussion of a diasporic culture in the making. Diaspora studies have grown immensely as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry over the past decade, and I situate my own position within that body of literature.26 Diaspora scholars have been attracted by the notion of “hybridity” in recent years to talk about the ways that selves are situated on the margins of society in a transnational and deterritorialized world.27 Although the idea of hybridity is an intriguing way to describe the “hyphenated” nature of diasporic identities and cultures, the term has some definitional problems because of its intentional ambiguity.28 Moreover, Robert Young has shown that the term has a questionable colonial history not often acknowledged by contemporary theorists who use the concept.29 Creolization also has a checkered colonial history, but it is a concept that has become well established in sociolinguistics, a field that provides one of the theoretical models that I employ in this book. My logic for using the creolization concept is that it is commonly used by creole makers themselves. People in Trinidad often evoke the word when talking about the dynamic processes involved in cultural mixing.
Essentially, the two terms have much in common, and I see hybridization as a postmodernist rendering of creolization. First, both terms emphasize a social process of mixture. Second, they both imply a strategy of empowerment used by “mixed” people to resist the hegemony of the dominant class. Homi Bhabha, for example, writes that hybridity is a “camouflage” that provides hybrid individuals with a “contesting antagonistic agency” to deal with the rules of social engagement.30 Others also make much of the strength afforded by hybridity’s “strategic biologism.” Just as hybrid corn exhibits strength and resistance, the argument goes, the hybrid individual can persevere under a variety of conditions.31 Camouflage and versatile strength are implied in the term creolization as well, because it provides creolized individuals a similar strategy for concealing certain things from the dominant class, thereby strengthening their own marginal positions in society.32 My alternative is to opt for a more extended discussion of creolization, a well-established part of the Caribbeanist vocabulary, and a term that is still often used as a time-honored synonym for the more recent theoretical development of cultural hybridization.33
Caribbeanists earlier had opened up extensive discussions of the processes of cultural synthesis and multivalent identity formation through using the linguistic metaphor of creolization. Moreover, Ulf Hannerz states that “a concept of creole culture with its congeners may be our most promising root metaphor.”34 I build on this earlier corpus of work by employing linguistic and cultural models of creolization as a method to understand the complex phenomenon of Trinidadian racial and ethnic relations as exemplified through public displays of ritual behavior during Hosay. In my discussion, I employ, analyze, and interrogate the concept of creolization to understand the dynamics of indigenization on the local level. Simultaneously, I look at concepts of situated or emergent ethnicity as a viable strategy for allowing change to occur within a canonized form of global theology that remains open to innovative local interpretations. An emic model based on the Shi‘i philosophical concept of taqi̅yyah (dissimulation), which allows believers to conceal their religious affiliation in particularly stressful contexts, combined with the etic s/x factor (esoteric/exoteric), provides a useful precedent for understanding indigenous modes of cultural and linguistic adaptation.35 The concept of taqi̅yyah as a religiously based strategy for cultural adaptation in a multicultural environment fits well with current social scientific discourses concerning the fluid notion of ethnic identity. I believe it can provide a viable theoretical complement to linguistic models of creolization and Bhabha’s concept of camouflage.
Sociolinguistic research over the past few decades has questioned the outdated and less useful devolutionary basis of language decay as the defining criterion of pidginization leading to creolization on a linear continuum.36 The more recent movement to understand such mixed forms as dynamic and expansive systems has allowed researchers to look at grammar and syntax in the specific social contexts within which they formally develop. Looking at the development of cultural grammars both diachronically and syncronically in the context of convergence—not as devolving from complex to simpler forms but the reverse—signals, as Dell Hymes puts it, a shift to adaptive creativity.37 It also provides richer possibilities for developing further the multidimensional approach advocated above. Such a strategic shift allows us better ways of explaining the negotiated and contested nature of cultural production. Similarly, a dynamic model of cultural grammars of maintenance, accommodation, and change allows me to look at the various modes of inflection that occur as religions and cultures increase their rate of encounter with other worldviews in the polyethnic environment of Trinidad. I therefore draw on this body of literature as well to counter certain misguided opinions about the decaying nature of Indian culture on the island.
The concept of creolization offers, in my opinion, the opportunity to account for the newly emergent and complex forms of culture that develop creatively through a synthetic process of convergence. In the context of Hosay, convergence can be understood either as the grafting of local elements and lexical labels borrowed from the socially dominant group (the superstrate) onto a structural substrate derived from historical precedents originating in India and earlier in Iran or as a coming together of parallel traditions. I argue that in the former we notice aspects of accommodation and acculturation as part of the creolization process, while in the latter we see resistance to creolization by way of decreolization. I understand these concepts not as either/or propositions that are mutually exclusive. Instead, one must see the processes as necessarily complementary and working in tandem with one another. In other words, creolization always implies decreolization; hence resistance can be accomplished through creative accommodation. What I mean by creative accommodation is that what might seem like acculturation on the surface may simultaneously be a valid form of resistance to total cultural absorption. Understanding the dialectics of creolization and decreolization from this point of view allows us to think metaphorically of the theological, esoteric, or global level of Hosay as the grammar of the ritual, while local innovations serve as the vocabulary of creative adaptation. I am aware, however, that no such distinction can be absolute because influences flow in both directions. I therefore do not posit any clear-cut binary distinction. Instead, I use sociolinguistic ideas about creolization as a heuristic for refining our understanding of cultural mixing in postcolonial contact zones, where diverse peoples come together to create local culture anew out of historically descended practices. By using the linguistic analogy described above, I identify and analyze both latent continuities and manifest changes that have occurred within this performance tradition over a fairly lengthy period of time and through space.
The idea of creolization, of course, raises important issues of authenticity, especially now that a virtually obscure and local rite has received international attention through media exposure. Partially, I have been to blame for this exposure due to the film on which I collaborated.38 The film and my previous publications on Hosay have, to a certain degree, alerted not only Islamicists and anthropologists but also, and more significantly in terms of ideological impact, Shi‘i missionaries to this relatively unknown Caribbean ritual phenomenon. Since 1994, for example, orthodox Shi‘i missionaries of East Indian descent from Canada have started a campaign to reform Hosay so that it will more closely resemble the rite as it is performed in Iran and other more conservative areas in the Shi‘i world. The missionaries aggressively argue that the Trinidadian variant is not “correct,” seeing it as an ill-informed deviation from the Iranian model. In my epilogue, I analyze this most recent development by situating the discourse of authenticity within the idea of emergent culture. By emergent culture, I mean “culture in the making,” always in the process of taking new forms to accommodate the needs of contemporary sensibilities. Like identity and ethnicity, ritual is produced dialogically through