The Devil has sent us
Another of his angels!
I prayed to God all day,
While I scrubbed the hut bare,
On the knuckles of my knees
All day in the hungry house;
Now God has sent me evil,
Who can understand it?
Death, death is coming nearer.
In this quote, Mother expresses her complicated relationship to religion. On one hand, her statement that she “prayed to God all day” stresses her devotion. Yet she also seems skeptical of God’s willingness to actually answer her prayers. Indeed, she attributes the Devil’s arrival to God, and also refers to the demons as the Devil’s “angels,” further muddying the boundary between God and the Devil. For Mother, the sense that God might not be all good does not lead her either to hate God or to stop believing in him. Instead, she understands praying to God as a difficult task she does, just as she scrubs “the hut bare/on the knuckles of my knees/all day.” She accepts that the ways of God are beyond her understanding. What she does understand is that she suffers, and that one day she will die.
Look, perhaps it is luckiest
Never to be born,
To the horror of this life
Crowded with shadows,
Never to have known
That the sun will go out,
The green leaf rust,
The strong tree be stricken
And the roaring spring quail;
Peace to you, unborn,
You can find comfort here.
In this quote, Mother builds on her philosophy of life as suffering. Speaking to the Bolom, she tries to convince it that there is comfort in being unborn, because it will never have to know “the horror of this life.” Although Mother’s life has been full of suffering, in the form of poverty and hunger, the horror she refers to here is specifically the horror of mortality. She tells the Bolom that “the sun will go out, the green leaf rust, the strong tree be stricken,” emphasizing that everything in the world eventually dies. Rather than a model of life in which human beings die while the world continues on, Mother understands mortality as all-encompassing. Indeed, more than death itself, the horror is the knowledge of death: the Bolom’s comfort is “never to have known, that the sun will go out…” More than our own eventual end, what is horrible about being a mortal human person is having to know this terrible thing about the world.
Bai Diable-là manger un 'ti mamaille,
Un, deux, trois 'ti mamaille!
Bai Diable-là manger un 'ti mamaille,
Un,
deux,
trois . . .
(Give the Devil a child for dinner,
One, two, three little children!
Give the devil a child for dinner,
One,
two,
three . . .)
The Devil first sings his song at the end of the Prologue, but he repeats it each time he eats one of the brothers. It takes the form of a simple counting song. This structure parallels the structure of the overall play, which will similarly repeat the same plot for each of the “one, two, three little children.” Furthermore, the structure of the song suggests that the Devil perceives the progression of the plot as inevitable: from the beginning, he feels sure that he will devour all three of the children, in the order he has set out. The song thus creates a foreboding mood, because it foreshadows the terrible events of the next two acts.
Walcott’s choice to have the song in French is also significant. Almost all of the play is written in a Caribbean patois, or a dialect of English that deviates from standard English in inventing a different grammar. Although this language is marked by colonization, it also implicitly emphasizes the capacity for colonized people to depart from the cultural practices imposed by the colonizers. In contrast, the Devil sings in French, a European language often presented by colonizers as the epitome of Western culture. By putting this language in the mouth of the Devil, Walcott suggests that there is danger in the things Europeans present as cultured and beautiful.
“The arm which digs a grave
Is the strongest arm of all.
Your grandfather, your father,
Their muscles like brown rivers
Rolling over rocks.
Now, they bury in small grass,
Just the jaws of the ant
Stronger than them now.”
Here, Mother is advising Gros Jean not to put too much trust in his own strength. In stating, “the arm which digs a grave/is the strongest arm of all,” she is speaking metaphorically. “The arm which digs a grave” is death, the force which determines when we die and are buried in the earth. Mother goes on to argue that death is stronger than any living thing because it transforms even the strongest man into weak earth. She tells Gros Jean that this happened to his ancestors, and that it will happen to him too. Her reference to “the jaws of the ant” is also interesting. Both Gros Jean and Mi-Jean are obsessed with their superiority over animals. However, part of Mother’s point is that all living things are equally weak, because they all die. Therefore, a man cannot believe himself to be fundamentally stronger even than an ant.
“Chief, why you don't take a rest too somewhat? You have all this land, all this big house and so forth, people working for you as if is ants self, but is only work, work, work in your mind, ent you has enough?”
When Gros Jean arrives at the plantation, the planter forces him to work constantly. Despite the strength and patience of the eldest son, he eventually gives in and has to take a break, even though the planter’s rules prohibit this. It is on this break that the planter drives him to anger, and Gros Jean loses the Devil’s bet. Here, he speaks to the Devil, and confronts his obsession with work. It isn’t really rational: the planter, unlike Gros Jean, has the wealth and power to live a life of leisure. However, he is still obsessed with work: in his case, the work of supervising his enslaved laborers in order to accumulate more and more wealth. Gros Jean’s statement emphasizes that this way of living isn’t inevitable, but actually depends on a very specific set of values. For the planter, wealth is not the means to an end, but rather the end itself. This way of thinking coexists with a similar sense that work is also inherently valuable, and, conversely, that leisure is evil. Even though Gros Jean thinks he is standing up to the Devil, he actually gives in to this way of thinking about the world because he buys into the idea that work is good. Only Ti-Jean, who does whatever he can to avoid working, can really destabilize the planter’s power.
“This book have every knowledge it have;
I checking up on man with cow-foot, boss,
In the section call religion, and tropical superstition…
This book is Latin mainly.
It have bos, meaning cow,
and pes, meaning foot,
Boss' foot, bospes, cow-heel perhaps, It have plenty recipe
But it don't give the source!”
At the beginning of the play, Mi-Jean’s defining trait is his interest in books. This interest prevents him from pursuing any practical skills, like learning to fish. When he leaves to confront the Devil, he brings with him an encyclopedia, which he believes to contain all the world’s knowledge. His meeting with the old man puts that knowledge to the test. In their conversation, he sees that one of the old man’s legs ends in a hoof instead of a foot. Rather than immediately recognizing this as an attribute of the Devil, he turns to his book, but the book only gives him linguistic information: it tells him the “recipe” for the word “cow-foot,” or the Latin roots the English word comes from. This information is useless, because it doesn’t tell him the significance of what he sees. Conversely, Ti-Jean, who is not learned, listens to the animals, who tell him to look out for this cow-foot as the sign of the Devil. Walcott thus emphasizes that all kinds of knowledge are not equal, and that knowledge trapped in books functions more to keep us from the world than to teach us about it.
“Descendant of the ape, how eloquent you have become! How assured in logic! How marvellous in invention! And yet, poor shaving monkey, the animal in you is still in evidence, that goat . . .”
This quote is an allusion to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who, in one of the play’s famous soliloquies, says “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals. And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?” The Devil’s syntax in this quote closely mirrors the structure of this famous line. When Hamlet says this, he leaves unquestioned man’s superiority. The crux of his assertion is instead his experience of the beautiful and marvelous world as meaningless—he is really saying something about his own mental state. In contrast, the Devil transforms these lines in order to weaponize them against Mi-Jean. The planter positions himself as a detached observer of an increasingly energetic Mi-Jean. In doing so, he treats Mi-Jean like an animal at a zoo, with the Devil observing him. In this, he exemplifies the racist dynamic of colonizers who perceived Black people as animals to be studied and controlled.
“I'll be what I am, so to hell with you. I'll be what I am. I drink, and I drink, and I feel nothing. Oh, I lack heart to enjoy the brevity of the world!
[ The FIREFLY passes, dancing]
Get out of my way, you burning backside. I'm the prince of obscurity and I won't brook interruption! Trying to mislead me, because I been drinking. Behave, behave. That youngster is having terrible effect on me. Since he came to the estate, I've felt like fool. First time in me life too. Look, just a while ago I nearly got angry at an insect that's just a half-arsed imitation of a star. It's wonderful! An insect brushes my dragonish hand, and my scales tighten with fear. Delightful! So this is what it means! I'm drunk, and hungry.
[ The FROG, his eyes gleaming, hops across his path]
O God, O God, a monster! Jesus, help! Now that for one second was the knowledge of death. O Christ, how weary it is to be immortal.”
In the beginning of the play, Mother expressed human awareness of mortality as a “horror,” a source of great suffering. However, by the end of the play, Walcott suggests that the reality is much more complicated. Mortal life is full of suffering, but it is also inherently meaningful. In contrast, the Devil’s immortality makes it impossible for him to enjoy the world. By stating, “I drink, and I drink, and I feel nothing. Oh, I lack heart to enjoy the brevity of the world,” he suggests that feeling must stem from “the brevity of the world”—the same attribute of life which Mother described when she told the Bolom, “the sun will go out, The green leaf rust, The strong tree be stricken.” Rather than a source of suffering, the Devil describes this knowledge as something to “enjoy,” because it would free him from the weariness of immortality. If nothing came to an end, the world would become dull, flat, and eventually meaningless. In contrast, the knowledge that things end creates the possibility for strong feeling and a life which feels worth living.
“They began by doing what you suggested. Dangerous. So naturally when the whole thing tired them, they got angry with themselves. The one way to annoy you is rank disobedience. Curried goat, yes.”
In this quote, Ti-Jean addresses the Devil. He says that his brothers acted dangerously in doing what the planter told them to do. Despite Gros Jean and Mi-Jean’s beliefs that they were being clever in relying on their patience and silence, respectively, Ti-Jean realizes that by working, they were actually going along with exactly what the Devil/planter wanted them to do. The only path to victory is “rank disobedience”—a complete refusal to play the game on the planter’s terms. Within the plot of the play, Ti-Jean’s defiance is what first drives the Devil to anger, because it shocks and upsets him. However, Walcott is also making an economic point. As the Black feminist Audre Lorde famously wrote, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” In agreeing to work for the planter, the two older brothers were trying to use the tools of white supremacy to defeat the slaver. Ti-Jean’s story proves that only a strategy for resistance which not only rejects the planter, but his tools of work and wealth, can win.
“All around you, nature
Still singing. The frog's
Croak doesn't stop for the dead;
The cricket is still merry,
The bird still plays its flute,
Every dawn, little Ti-Jean . . .”
At the end of the play, Ti-Jean watches his Mother die, and nearly gives up hope. At this crucial moment, the firefly sings this song. In it, he expresses a different model for understanding the relationship between life and death. In contrast to the mother’s opening portrayal of the world as a place where everything ends, the firefly stresses that the world goes on, even after death. Even as Mother dies, “the cricket is still merry, the bird still plays its flute, every dawn.” In this philosophy, death and eternity coexist. Individuals die, but the order of the world continues every day in the same reliable way. The pain of death is thus softened by the immortality of the community of living things.
