ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Obeah’s function in emergent West Indian communities and nations that may choose to define themselves in their own language(s). It traces the employment of Obeah as a narrative trope in Anglophone Caribbean fiction across the twentieth century, highlighting the tensions implicit in attempting to integrate these unruly practices–these rebellious epistemologies–into various projects of narrative nation-building. Obeah, as a product of Caribbean slavery, emerged as a response to the deracination, domination and near obliteration of the plantation system; it has always represented a threat to ‘law and order,’ a challenge to established ways of seeing. Minty Alley’s and Black Fauns’ representations of Obeah centre it within a national literary culture yet-to-come, and challenge their own realist, ‘rationalist’ assumptions of veracity, authenticity and narratory authority. Ultimately, writers who engage with Obeah assume the mantle of grappling with Obeah’s contentiousness, of re/telling stories of our spirituality behind what are still considered by many to be ‘enemy lines.’
