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 Heart for Craft.
Contagious and unbridled, it was the form of snicker that stuffed the room with pleasure, that supplied an ephemeral imaginative and prescient of a bit lady unburdened by life’s woes. I virtually all the time 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 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 typically be current for this retelling, cloaked in each disgrace and amusement. She would combat 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 basically rural expertise; as a sheltered baby in city Jamaica, my solely encounter with the observe was by means of 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 youngsters screaming, crying, and operating 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 advanced histories, resistance, and survival methods. These figures weren’t simply symbols of a Christmas festivity; they had been echoes of a individuals’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 Fantasy, 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 Fortress. 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) continues to be debated. Some students, similar 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 continually transmutes, adapting to shifting social, political, and cultural environments. This triadic framework of pleasure, lodging, and resistance supplies a lens by means of which to know 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 house owners would solely enable the enslaved in the future out of the yr between the commentary of Christmas and the New Yr 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 remodeled and tailored, syncretizing parts from West African masquerades and European festivities.
In Jamaica, alternatively, 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 and venture a way of dignity that might rival their colonizers. These costumes, with their ornate decorations and regal motifs, had been strategic selections aimed 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. Via 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 turned a battleground for asserting cultural and political energy. Underneath the management of officers like Mayor S.H. Fishblate, the annual performances had been regulated, contained, and at occasions banned totally, 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 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 situations that formed Jonkonnu’s authentic expressions develop into caricatured, remodeling a strong efficiency of selfhood right into a managed reenactment for public consumption. There are these, nevertheless, who’re making an attempt to re-introduce that ingredient 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 impartial of the Tryon Palace administration, in hopes of reclaiming its true type.
These diversified iterations of Jonkonnu replicate a shared impulse to barter energy and identification in environments outlined by domination and resistance. Any try and pinpoint Jonkonnu’s origins or distill its essence right into a singular narrative could be reductive. As a substitute, Jonkonnu should 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 an exquisite patchwork ensemble with repurposed earrings as elaborations (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 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 “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 properly have birthed parts of Hip-Hop and Black queer trend tradition by means of their daring and evocative stylings, because the up to date echo of Jonkonnu’s sartorial defiance might be seen in occasions like Durag Fest in Charlotte, North Carolina. This annual summer time competition is a celebration of Black hair tradition and magnificence that subverts stereotypes of the durag as a logo of criminality, reclaiming it as a marker of cultural delight and artistic expression. Like Jonkonnu, Durag Fest is an area the place Black individuals can assert their identities on their very own phrases, utilizing trend 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 means of inhabiting a number of realities — previous, current, and future — concurrently.
Denali Jöel posed as an autobiographical masked (Jonkonnu) character to symbolize a rigidity 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 Useless: 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 claim 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 diminished to mere spectacle, I stay interested in 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 delivered to life by means of these keen to protect it.
Jonkonnu’s energy lies in its refusal to be binary and static, continually evolving in response to its surroundings. 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 continued battle for self-definition and liberation. Via the interaction of pleasure, lodging, and resistance, it boldly declares: “We will be seen. We will be heard. We are here.”
