ABSTRACT
What designates scholarship as distinctively African/a? What defines African diasporic (biblical) hermeneutics? And is it possible for a queer Anglo-wo/man, such as myself, to employ a hermeneutic rooted in and inflected by the African diaspora? In this essay, I attempt to engage and embody these inquiries through the interpretation of a popular folktale (found in the Hebrew Bible) with sacred symbolic significance for the Rastafari movement: the story of Samson and the Philistines. Within the history of its reception the character Samson has become a cultural icon of sorts; the biblical tragicomic (anti)hero of excessive strength, unbridled passions, insatiable appetites, and capricious (not to mention violent) outbursts is indubitably a figure of considerable ambivalence whose personhood is portrayed always as and in relation to an Other. Samson’s effective physical prowess and affective mortal weakness have left his readers and audiencemuch like Delilah and the Philistines-bewildered and frustrated in their attempts to “pin him down” or contain him. While most biblical scholars situate Samson and his story neatly within the genre of folktale, no scholar to date has actually considered how Samson has been (re)appropriated as folktale-a much more precarious project indeed.1 As yet, no scholar has explored the meaning of Samson within post-biblical communities whose social structures are characterized by orality within contexts of imperial domination, in order to speculate about the story’s significance and function within (its so-called) or(igin)al contexts. Ultimately, then, engaging the work of Bakhtin (Carnivalesque-Grotesque), Glissant (Relationality), and Halberstam (Failure), I endeavor to make a so-called postcolonial and queerly affective reading of Samson, ruminating on the potentiality of his meaning and signification for the post-exilic Persian community of Yehud qua the Rastafari movement through a (poststructuralist) Rastafari re-membering of Samsonwhere the events of his life and death as well as his relationship(s) to and with the Philistines have radical revolutionary implications for all life lived (in the) OtherWise. In the interpretation of Samson (or any biblical character) to ask who (a question of identity) is to implicitly ask whose (i.e., the interpreter of that who): “Who’s/Whose Samson?” 2 The preservation of the ambiguity resident in this inquiry is critical to (poststructuralist theory and to) my project, for whether
explicitly acknowledged or not, asking the former elicits the latter. To adequately “answer” the former (Who is Samson?) is to always already acknowledge/accent its contingency upon the latter (Whose Samson?) and to accept the impossibility of a definitive origin or source for either.3 Therefore, I query in an effort to get us reflecting upon the ways in which the character Samson-through the re-membering and the re-memory of his folktale-has been interpreted, appropriated, and deployed by many diverse communities for vast and varied purposes.4 In the current iteration of this project, however, I focus solely upon the Rastafari appropriation of Samson and venture an entirely avant garde interpretation of the final scene of the folktale through Rastafari biblical hermeneutics.5 At heart, then, my interest in Samson, his reception history or narrative (legacy) and his rhetorical and, therefore, always already political reappropriation-Samson’s re-membering and [re]deployment by interpretive bodies-is to be found (like any other hermeneutic entanglement) in what is at stake in the encounter. Why does Samson matter, to whom, and how does he function.6 It is my hypothesis that Samson’s is a (textual) body that matters affectively to and for social bodies-both ancient and contemporary-in the (political) performance and (re)production of communal ethics and identities.7 In attending to these analyses one may only conjecture about the function of Samson as folktale within the post-exilic community of Yehud-the context in which this narrative would have emerged in its [not so] “final” form. Might the oral performance of such a grotesque enfleshing of (a failed) ritual embodiment not only reflect more acutely (and accurately) the precarity and complex religious and political negotiations of a marginalized community of bodies under empire but also more effectively function to empower those bodies than a totalizing myth of absolute strength and sovereignty in the face of that oppression? Here contemporary discourse on Queer and Affect Theory inflect a Rastafari biblical hermeneutic as I read Samson’s story in Judges 13-16 for its disruptive ambivalence as Carnivalesque-Grotesque. The folktale’s affective power, however, is not merely evinced in our ambivalent reactions to the narrative or traditional interpretations which bifurcate its protagonist-what I understand to be an affectual effect of the dialectic of disgust and desire. The affective fecundity of this tale is most visceral and, therefore, evident in the way in which Samson has become a biblical specter of great ubiquity, who seems to symbolically stand on his own.8 It is, then, understandably difficult to imagine Samson OtherWise; that is, as other than either Samson of great strength who ultimately defeats himself (surrendering to temptation at the hands of the wicked woman Delilah) or Samson the sacrificial servant of YHWH (who kills himself in order to defeat the evil Philistines and bring “salvation” to the Israelites). Even as Samson is “repulsed by and attracted to the Philistines” (and they to him),9 so too are readers caught in an interpretive web of liminal ambivalencefor this is a tale which surely pulls its audiences in even as it pushes us away (and not only from its protagonist).10 Upon my interpretation and, therefore, remembering through an embodied biblical hermeneutic at the intersections of orality and affect, Samson of Judges 13-16 is a cypher for “Israel” (Yehud) and through him this ancient communal body becomes an intra-historical affective
body engaging other bodies across temporo-spatiality.11 There are therefore, profound political and relational implications both in the text’s “original” contexts (Judah and Yehud) and for contemporary interpretive bodies-perhaps no more palpable than the Rastafari movement, who re-member Samson as the original lock bearing Rasta.12 In the dialogical process of interpretation, as the postmodern reader engages the text as folktale (originally performed orally), penned by a diasporic (post-exilic) people, alongside the Rastafarian Samson, these representations converge, even as they diverge, as assemblage in the event of a sort of trans-temporal cross-cultural poetics (Glissant), emerging as something altogether new-firmly rooted in the past yet perpetually transmuting.13 In this way, then, the making of Samson within its ancient context and the re-membering of Samson in contemporary Rastafari biblical hermeneutics is an embodied encounter with the Other outside (and inside) ourselves-with the potential to affect (transform) and be affected (transformed) by the bodies involved in each particular performative (re)iteration. Inspired by this dialogical intra-temporal or cultural-relational poetics of interpretation, I consider each of these theoretical and political pieces and then move to interpret Judges 16:25ff in order to expose the innumerable interpretive events whereby Samson can only ever be other than either (good)/or (bad) . . . and is always already embodied in/as his re-membering OtherWise.
