Egúngún Àgbà (elder) masquerade performer from West Africa with horns that trace at a familial lineage of hunters or warriors. (photograph by and courtesy Margaret Drewal)
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 Middle for Craft.
Contagious and unbridled, it was the form of snigger that crammed the room with pleasure, that supplied an ephemeral imaginative and prescient of a little bit lady unburdened by life’s woes. I nearly 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 referred to as Jonkonnu and tripped over her personal ft.
“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 usually be current for this retelling, cloaked in each disgrace and amusement. She would battle to withhold her smile, but it surely was laborious to withstand the humor. As soon as the air of amusement grew skinny, my aunt would snidely say, “Mi still nuh like dem.”
The Jonkonnu parade is an primarily rural expertise; as a sheltered youngster in city Jamaica, my solely encounter with the observe was by means of this story till I used to be round 20 years outdated. However in December of 2013, at a Christmas Honest in Kingston, I lastly encountered my aunt’s nemeses. The sight of youngsters 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 Lady, 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 advanced histories, resistance, and survival methods. These figures weren’t simply symbols of a Christmas festivity; they have been echoes of a folks’s resilience and self-affirmation, handed down by means of generations.
Isaac M. Belisario, Illustration of Jonkonnu character Actor Boy or Koo-Koo in Kingston, Jamaica (1837) (picture courtesy the Nationwide Gallery of Jamaica)The Masks, The Fable, The Legend
The origins of Jonkonnu are nonetheless shrouded in thriller. Some attribute the title 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, recommend a connection to the Yoruba phrase “Jonkoliko,” referring to 1 elevated as a determine of humor or shame. This hyperlink is compelling, notably given the visible similarities between Jonkonnu masks and Egungun, the annual Yoruba masquerade pageant.
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 gives a lens by means of which to grasp Jonkonnu’s enduring relevance throughout geographies and temporalities.
Jonkonnu performers, together with a Ragman masquerader, with drummers and dancers at Tryon Palace in New Bern, North Carolina (photograph by and courtesy Grey Whitley)Jonkonnu Has Three Faces: Pleasure, Lodging, Resistance
Historian Elizabeth Fenn, in her 1988 paper entitled “‘A Perfect Equality Seemed to Reign’: Slave Society and Jonkonnu,” aptly describes the observe of Jonkonnu or “John Kunering” as akin to releasing a steam valve: Plantation homeowners would solely permit the enslaved at some point out of the 12 months between the commentary 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 well known as Junkanoo, a vibrant carnival-like pageant that embodies the enjoyment of collective identity-making. The pageant’s flamboyant costumes and energetic dancing are expressions of a shared historical past that has remodeled and tailored, syncretizing parts from West African masquerades and European festivities.
In Jamaica, then again, the observe of Jonkonnu is extra ambivalent in that it wields the twin perform of masquerade as each a software for assimilation and a refined critique of colonial authority. On one hand, performers donned elaborate regalia impressed by European aesthetics in an try to mission a way of dignity that might rival their colonizers. These costumes, with their ornate decorations and regal motifs, have been strategic decisions 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.
Jonkonnu celebrants, Kingston, Jamaica, Christmas 1975 (picture public area by way of Wikimedia Commons)
Alternatively, Jonkonnu’s use of animalistic and grotesque parts functioned as a type of satirical mimicry that turned the gaze again on the colonizers. By means of exaggerated performances and beast-like masks, the masqueraders mirrored the colonizers’ brutality — a condemnation the British failed to acknowledge, dismissing it as merely “exotic” 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 remodeled right into a extra subdued and controlled type, 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 instances banned solely, reflecting a broader technique to suppress Black cultural expression and assert White dominance. This battle has left its mark on the modern-day model of Jonkonnu, now “sanitized” as a vacationer attraction at Tryon Palace.
The 2 main 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. By means of these figures, the situations that formed Jonkonnu’s unique expressions turn into caricatured, reworking 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 factor of company into the observe. The now-retired African-American Outreach Coordinator at Tryon Palace, Sharon C. Bryant, has been the only real vanguard of the observe in New Bern since 1999 and is dedicated to defending its existence unbiased of the Tryon Palace administration, in hopes of reclaiming its true type.
These diverse 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 an alternative, Jonkonnu have to be understood as a fancy craft and cultural efficiency that mirrors the nuances of Black life throughout the diaspora.
Durag Fest patron Breanna Powell adorned in a good looking patchwork ensemble with repurposed earrings as gildings (photograph by and courtesy Tayla Berry)A Competition 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 Lady, 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 “festival 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 might very nicely have birthed parts of Hip-Hop and Black queer vogue tradition by means of their daring and evocative stylings, because the up to date echo of Jonkonnu’s sartorial defiance could be seen in occasions like Durag Fest in Charlotte, North Carolina. This annual summer season pageant 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 pleasure and inventive expression. Like Jonkonnu, Durag Fest is an area the place Black folks 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, isn’t just about concealing one’s identification. It’s about reworking the self, embodying new personas, and navigating the boundaries of the seen and unseen. It’s a means of inhabiting a number of realities — previous, current, and future — concurrently.
Denali Jöel posed as an autobiographical masked (Jonkonnu) character to characterize a stress with identification (photograph by and courtesy David Shaw)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 may be referred to as its “spirit” — is, in essence, a physique that reclaims a way of self-possession. In authorized phrases, it’s nearly 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 reminiscences and resist being lowered to mere spectacle, I stay interested by 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 isn’t only a pageant, however a dwelling archive of intersectional Black life, one that may solely be dropped at life by means of these prepared 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 battle for self-definition and liberation. By means of the interaction of pleasure, lodging, and resistance, it boldly declares: “We will be seen. We will be heard. We are here.”
