Erotic Marronage
“For the first time I began to feel that the Maroons belonged to the sultry side of the
Caribbean and that their Spanish and Indian and African ancestors must have known
passions other than warfare.”
—Katherine Dunham, Journey to Accompong
Where others had seen evidence of African cultural survival in the New World, Katherine Dunham found instead what we might call the erotics of marronage. It was the way they danced—the sacred, embodied, and sensuous ways of knowing that pulsed through each movement. A renowned dancer and choreographer in her own right, Dunham traveled to Jamaica in 1935 to conduct ethnographic fieldwork among the Accompong Maroons and was enraptured by their bodily expression. Theirs is a history of warfare, bloodshed, and betrayal, certainly, but also the wild and untamed intimacies that unfolded in the Maroon enclave, the passions indulged in the shadow of the plantation landscape, and the longings that cultivated a sense of rootedness in the wake of displacement.
Furtive glances, stolen embraces, fleeting touch, whispered promises—these are the practices of erotic marronage. Tenderness and play, but danger as well: an insurrection plot hatched breathlessly at night in a close circle, a pulsing heart and trembling limbs melting into the rhythms of the forest in the moment of flight, a blood-soaked oath of loyalty sworn under the full moon, learning to use secluded earth as camouflage, defense, and sustenance. The choreography of warfare and the improvised dance of clandestine belonging existed on the same continuum. Life-sustaining ancestral knowledge was hidden away like rice grains in hair. These were the dark pleasures of the fugitive.
Ashon Crawley puts it this way: “Marronage is the practice of what Audre Lorde calls the erotic, it is an otherwise spacetime density and field and zone in which deep longing and poetry as a way of life, a coming together of knowledge as performance of otherwise possibility, dances and plays and settles in love and joy.”[1]
There's worldmaking poetry, for example, in the secret gatherings Stephanie Camp described in her history of slavery and everyday resistance in the antebellum U.S.[2] Imagine the brush of a favorite dress against the legs, or a ribbon affixed to the hair just so. Recall that sermon in the clearing insisting on the love and care of the flesh.[3] What did it take to claim the sensations denied to the captive, especially in the midst of ongoing brutality?
To dream of freedom is also to participate in a pedagogy of desire. Think of Ntozake Shange's young colored girl who took Toussaint L'Ouverture, famed general of the world's only Maroon Nation, as her “secret lover the age of 8” when she snuck into the adult reading room of the public library.[4] Or consider Dionne Brand's reminiscences of trying to satisfy her cravings for sweetness as a young girl and finding the Black Napoleon instead. “So I had never met Toussaint L'Ouverture,” she writes, “until I saw him at the bottom of the wardrobe drawer with the cakes and sugar.”[5] I am interested in how these intimate encounters with the past of Black revolution constitute a black feminist erotics of history. How do they suggest new practices of reading?
We might return to the archive of Maroon warfare in search of these other passions. In the time of ongoing war, can we flee into each other? Can we feel and move our way to something like freedom? Perhaps then we might reimagine our own fugitive dances enacted at the threshold of pleasure and danger.
Remember when we danced in the dark? Run, but take me with you.
Bradley L. Craig is the 2020-22 Barra Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. An interdisciplinary historian of the Atlantic World, he received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and is currently working on his first book project, Oathbound: The Trelawny Maroons of Jamaica in the Revolutionary Atlantic World.
[1] Ashon T. Crawley, The Lonely Letters (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 122.
[2] Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
[3] Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage International, 2004).
[4] Ntozake Shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf (Alexander Street Press, 1975), 11. Johnhenry Gonzalez, Maroon Nation: A History of Revolutionary Haiti (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).
[5] Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes on Belonging (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2001), 186-187.