This text is a part of a collection specializing in underrepresented craft histories, researched and written by the 2024 Craft Archive Fellows, and arranged in collaboration with the Heart for Craft.
Contagious and unbridled, it was the type of snigger that stuffed the room with pleasure, that provided an ephemeral imaginative and prescient of a little bit woman unburdened by life’s woes. I virtually at all times forgot what the joke was about, so tickled was I by the sight of her writhing in her red-velvet-upholstered mahogany armchair. She hurled her head backwards and forwards, gripping her stomach, all thirty-twos on full show as she struggled to succeed in the punchline — a uncommon, vigorous, and delightful sight. Few issues introduced me a lot pleasure at Christmastime as when my mom recounted the story of how her sister, my aunt, ran from the Jamaican masked masqueraders generally known as Jonkonnu and tripped over her personal toes.
“Jonkonnu a come … Jonkonnu a come!” she would exclaim in her full-bodied reenactment of how my aunt dashed in fright on the announcement that this grim parade of masqueraders was shortly approaching their doorstep. My aunt would typically be current for this retelling, cloaked in each disgrace and amusement. She would struggle to withhold her smile, however it was onerous to withstand the humor. As soon as the air of amusement grew skinny, my aunt would snidely say, “Mi nonetheless nuh like dem.”
The Jonkonnu parade is an primarily rural expertise; as a sheltered youngster in city Jamaica, my solely encounter with the follow was via this story till I used to be round 20 years previous. However in December of 2013, at a Christmas Honest in Kingston, I lastly encountered my aunt’s nemeses. The sight of kids screaming, crying, and working in all cardinal instructions in determined seek for refuge behind their guardians was a prelude to what I noticed subsequent: Pitchy Patchy, Stomach Girl, Satan, Policeman, Horse Head — masked characters in roughly constructed outfits, lurching ahead with menacing glee. This encounter with the enigmatic figures of Jonkonnu was my initiation right into a world of complicated histories, resistance, and survival methods. These figures weren’t simply symbols of a Christmas festivity; they have been echoes of a individuals’s resilience and self-affirmation, handed down via generations.
The Masks, The Delusion, The Legend
The origins of Jonkonnu are nonetheless shrouded in thriller. Some attribute the identify to John Conney, a celebrated cabocero (chief) at Tres Puntas in Axim on the Guinea coast. Conney, a profitable Gold Coast service provider, dominated over three Brandenburg buying and selling forts on the coast of present-day Ghana. By 1724, the Dutch had taken management of his official residence, the Nice Fredricksburg Fort. Regardless of being displaced, Conney continued to be celebrated in tales carried throughout the Atlantic by enslaved Africans.
But the phonetic transformation from John Conney to Jonkonnu (or its variations like John Canoe, Junkanoo, John Kuner, and others) remains to be debated. Some students, akin to Richard Allsopp, counsel a connection to the Yoruba phrase “Jonkoliko,” referring to at least one elevated as a determine of humor or shame. This hyperlink is compelling, significantly given the visible similarities between Jonkonnu masks and Egungun, the annual Yoruba masquerade competition.
Regardless of its obscured origins, Jonkonnu’s cultural significance is profound. Fellow artist Marie Kellier posits that Jonkonnu has two faces: pleasure and resistance. I’d dare to say there’s a 3rd face — lodging. It’s a craft and situation that always transmutes, adapting to shifting social, political, and cultural environments. This triadic framework of pleasure, lodging, and resistance supplies a lens via which to know Jonkonnu’s enduring relevance throughout geographies and temporalities.
Jonkonnu Has Three Faces: Pleasure, Lodging, Resistance
Historian Elizabeth Fenn, in her 1988 paper entitled “‘A Excellent Equality Appeared to Reign’: Slave Society and Jonkonnu,” aptly describes the follow of Jonkonnu or “John Kunering” as akin to releasing a steam valve: Plantation house owners would solely enable the enslaved someday out of the 12 months between the statement of Christmas and the New 12 months to collectively have fun marriages, births, and newfound freedom; to mourn deaths; or just to launch angst in full abandon.
Within the Bahamas, Jonkonnu is widely known as Junkanoo, a vibrant carnival-like competition that embodies the enjoyment of collective identity-making. The competition’s flamboyant costumes and energetic dancing are expressions of a shared historical past that has reworked and tailored, syncretizing parts from West African masquerades and European festivities.
In Jamaica, however, the follow of Jonkonnu is extra ambivalent in that it wields the twin perform of masquerade as each a software for assimilation and a delicate critique of colonial authority. On one hand, performers donned elaborate regalia impressed by European aesthetics in an try to undertaking a way of dignity that would rival their colonizers. These costumes, with their ornate decorations and regal motifs, have been strategic selections geared toward demonstrating refinement and humanity, difficult the dehumanizing stereotypes imposed on the enslaved inhabitants. By adopting the colonizers’ personal symbols of status, the enslaved and freed performers sought to raise their standing and declare visibility inside a social construction designed to exclude them.
However, Jonkonnu’s use of animalistic and grotesque parts functioned as a type of satirical mimicry that turned the gaze again on the colonizers. Via exaggerated performances and beast-like masks, the masqueraders mirrored the colonizers’ brutality — a condemnation the British failed to acknowledge, dismissing it as merely “unique” or “primitive” African spectacle. As Judith Bettelheim asserts, Jonkonnu’s embrace of British folklore was not merely an act of submission however a fancy interaction of assimilation and subversion, the place the enslaved used the very symbols of their oppressors to each survive and resist.
The evolution of Jonkonnu in New Bern, North Carolina reveals how its preliminary faces — pleasure and resistance — have reworked right into a extra subdued and controlled kind, presenting its third face: lodging. Within the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jonkonnu grew to become a battleground for asserting cultural and political energy. Beneath the management of officers like Mayor S.H. Fishblate, the annual performances have been regulated, contained, and at occasions banned fully, reflecting a broader technique to suppress Black cultural expression and assert White dominance. This wrestle has left its mark on the modern-day model of Jonkonnu, now “sanitized” as a vacationer attraction at Tryon Palace.
The 2 major characters of this new type of Jonkonnu, the Fancy Man and the Ragman, embody the racialized dichotomy of refinement and degradation, providing a palatable spectacle that obscures the custom’s deeper histories of subversion and resistance. Via these figures, the circumstances that formed Jonkonnu’s unique expressions turn out to be caricatured, remodeling a robust efficiency of selfhood right into a managed reenactment for public consumption. There are these, nevertheless, who’re making an attempt to re-introduce that component of company into the follow. The now-retired African-American Outreach Coordinator at Tryon Palace, Sharon C. Bryant, has been the only real vanguard of the follow in New Bern since 1999 and is dedicated to defending its existence unbiased of the Tryon Palace administration, in hopes of reclaiming its true kind.
These diversified iterations of Jonkonnu mirror a shared impulse to barter energy and identification in environments outlined by domination and resistance. Any try to pinpoint Jonkonnu’s origins or distill its essence right into a singular narrative could be reductive. As a substitute, Jonkonnu have to be understood as a fancy craft and cultural efficiency that mirrors the nuances of Black life throughout the diaspora.
A Pageant of Rags: Materials Resistance
Jonkonnu costumes are a testomony to the ingenuity and creativity of its practitioners. From the tattered rags of Pitchy Patchy to the exaggerated types of the Stomach Girl, these clothes are greater than mere adornments. Crafted from no matter supplies can be found — rags, animal skins, paper, and located objects, these costumes in flip craft the self. This “competition of rags” is each a nod to the resourcefulness born out of shortage and a deliberate inversion of colonial expectations of propriety and order.
These costumes could very effectively have birthed parts of Hip-Hop and Black queer vogue tradition via their daring and evocative stylings, because the modern echo of Jonkonnu’s sartorial defiance will be seen in occasions like Durag Fest in Charlotte, North Carolina. This annual summer season competition is a celebration of Black hair tradition and elegance that subverts stereotypes of the durag as an emblem of criminality, reclaiming it as a marker of cultural delight and inventive expression. Like Jonkonnu, Durag Fest is an area the place Black individuals can assert their identities on their very own phrases, utilizing vogue as a type of resistance and self-affirmation.
Masking, as practiced in Jonkonnu and occasions like Durag Fest, is not only about concealing one’s identification. It’s about remodeling the self, embodying new personas, and navigating the boundaries of the seen and unseen. It’s a method of inhabiting a number of realities — previous, current, and future — concurrently.
Masking As An Embodied Craft and Praxis
Masking is waymaking. It’s a craft that intertwines physique and reminiscence, spirit and materiality. American theater historian and scholar Joseph Roach, in his 1996 publication titled Cities of the Lifeless: Circum-Atlantic Efficiency, argues {that a} physique that carries its social reminiscence — what is perhaps referred to as its “spirit” — is, in essence, a physique that reclaims a way of self-possession. In authorized phrases, it’s virtually akin to proudly owning oneself, echoing the language as soon as utilized by Anglo-Individuals to say so-called inalienable rights.
As a Black queer nonbinary Jamaican-turned-United States citizen, my very own journey to changing into has been parallel to my geographical migration, bringing me right into a deep engagement with the assorted methods I, too, have practiced the act of masking. Just like the Mardi Gras Indians who dance to reclaim their ancestral recollections and resist being lowered to mere spectacle, I stay inquisitive about how Jonkonnu may need hybridized with the Black trans expertise, the place we too are sometimes caught between visibility as spectacle and denigration. This complexity is what makes Jonkonnu sacred: it’s not only a competition, however a residing archive of intersectional Black life, one that may solely be dropped at life via these keen to protect it.
Jonkonnu’s energy lies in its refusal to be binary and static, always evolving in response to its atmosphere. Whether or not within the masquerades of Jamaica, the Junkanoo parades of the Bahamas, or the regulated performances in North Carolina, it’s a testomony to Black resilience, creativity, and resistance. At its core, Jonkonnu embodies the continuing wrestle for self-definition and liberation. Via the interaction of pleasure, lodging, and resistance, it boldly declares: “We can be seen. We can be heard. We’re right here.”
