Summary
Act 3 of Ti-Jean and His Brothers begins slightly differently from the previous two acts. As in Act 2, the curtain opens to the two graves of Gros Jean and Mi-Jean. However, here the first lines are the Devil's song, “Bai Diable-là manger un 'ti mamaille,/Un, deux, trois 'ti mamaille!” (Give the Devil a child for dinner,/One, two, three children). Then the old man speaks and calls out for the Devil to eat the third child.
Meanwhile, Ti-Jean is speaking to his mother. She pleads with him not to leave home, because he is all she has left. Furthermore, she stresses that he is small and unlearned. Ti-Jean responds that his life belongs to God, and that he must follow his task, regardless of what he wants. Then he asks his mother to pray for him, something both of his brothers were too proud to ask. In the background, the Bolom cries out, and Mother responds, clearly afraid for her last living son. Ti-Jean leaves anyway, comparing himself to the biblical David, who defeated Goliath despite his size.
As soon as he leaves, he comes across the animals, and speaks kindly to each of them. They advise him to avoid the old man, who they call “worldly wisdom.” They tell him he carries a pile of sticks on his back, and has a cloven hoof. The animals also promise to warn Ti-Jean when he approaches.
Suddenly, Ti-Jean spots the two crosses, marking the graves of his brothers. As he looks at them, the old man arrives. The old man and Ti-Jean speak together about death, and the latter man insists that everything in the world is blessed, even the death of his mother. While they are speaking, Ti-Jean tries to surprise the old man and reveal his cloven foot, but his feet are just ordinary human feet below his skirt, and Ti-Jean grows frightened.
As Ti-Jean cowers by the graves of his two brothers, the bird returns and begins to untie the sticks on the Devil’s back. Ti-Jean pretends to offer to help, but instead loosens the knots still further, and the sticks fall on the ground. The old man curses him, but as he crouches to collect the branches, Ti-Jean again lifts up his skirt and sees a forked tail. This returns his confidence, because now he knows for sure who the old man is.
Ti-Jean demands that the Devil come forward, and the old man takes off his mask, revealing the face of the Devil. He tells Ti-Jean that now he must answer the terms of their bargain, and get to work. The face of the Devil is as difficult to look at as the face of the sun, and Ti-Jean has to ask him to put his mask back on.
The Devil first tells Ti-Jean to try and tie up his goat—the same goat which drove Mi-Jean to anger with its constant bleating. The smallest brother ties it up quickly and comes back, but it soon escapes again. Ti-Jean expresses a little frustration, but he returns to the goat, and this time comes back with “goat seed” in his hands. He has castrated the goat, so that it won’t want to run off anymore. The Devil is clearly a little annoyed, but he gives Ti-Jean another impossible task—to count every leaf in the fields of cane sugar on the plantation. Immediately, Ti-Jean decides that that is a waste of time, so instead he tells the workers in the fields to burn the cane. This way, there won’t be anything to count! Everyone exits the stage to a chant of “burn, burn, burn de cane!”
Analysis
In the first half of Act 3, the allegorical dimensions of Ti-Jean and His Brothers become much more important. Allegory refers to a story in which characters represent something else. The most well-known allegory in recent memory is probably Animal Farm, in which different animals represent different members of the early Soviet government. Historically, allegorical characters have more commonly represented abstract ideas.
In Ti-Jean and His Brothers, Derek Walcott is drawing especially on medieval morality plays, in which characters often represent virtues or vices, as well as collectives like “humankind.” When watching this play, the individual brothers usually act like characters in a folk tale, but they interact with characters who sometimes seem more like allegories than individuals. In the beginning of Act 3, the frog warns Ti-Jean, “beware of an old man whose name is worldly wisdom.” From this, we gather that the old man is a representation of “worldly wisdom”—a way of knowing the world rooted in daily human experience. Through the character of the old man, Walcott suggests that this way of knowing is burdensome (as the old man is burdened by sticks), and a cover for the evil of the Devil.
In contrast, Ti-Jean represents a different kind of wisdom. Unlike Mi-Jean, who puts his faith in books, Ti-Jean has little learning. Instead, he is able to rely on other people. His mother emphasizes that he is the only one of her three sons to kneel before her and ask for her blessing. He is also the only brother to come to the animals for advice. Later, the bird repays Ti-Jean’s kindness by untying the sticks on his back. We get a sense of what Walcott is going for here when Ti-Jean says, “If he is an old man, and mortal,/He will judge everything on earth/By his own sad experience.”
The problem with worldly wisdom is that it limits us to our own experience, and individual experience is ultimately pretty bleak: we grow old and weak, and then we die. But Ti-Jean believes there is another way to be in the world, in which we judge the earth based on more than what we can know as an individual. When Ti-Jean declares, “I think nothing dies. My brothers are dead but they live in the memory of my mother,” he is showing off the strength of this different way of knowing the world. By refusing to think of his brothers as pure individuals, but instead acknowledging the possibility of their living on in someone else’s memory, he is able to escape the horror of death.
By seeing beyond his own goals as an individual, Ti-Jean is able to outmaneuver the Devil in ways his brothers could not. Both Gros Jean and Mi-Jean were fixated on success, and that fixation convinced them that their only hope was to work. Although they attempt to resist the Devil, they fundamentally accept his terms. In contrast, Ti-Jean, who is only concerned with what God wants, doesn’t have any respect for work as a concept. His goal is always to get away with doing as little as possible, and that allows him to repeatedly trick the Devil. In the context of plantation labor, Ti-Jean is able to resist because he rejects the whole system, as well as the individual plantation owner.
