WE HAVE NO DESIRE to define the TAZ or to elaborate dogmas
about how it must be created. Our contention is rather
that it has been created, will be created, and is being
created. Therefore it would prove more valuable and
interesting to look at some TAZs past and present, and to
speculate about future manifestations; by evoking a few
prototypes we may be able to gauge the potential scope of
the complex, and perhaps even get a glimpse of an
"archetype." Rather than attempt any sort of encyclopaedism
we'll adopt a scatter-shot technique, a mosaic of glimpses,
beginning quite arbitrarily with the 16th-17th centuries and
the settlement of the New World.
The opening of the "new" world was conceived from the start
as an occultist operation. The magus John Dee, spiritual
advisor to Elizabeth I, seems to have invented the concept
of "magical imperialism" and infected an entire generation
with it. Halkyut and Raleigh fell under his spell, and
Raleigh used his connections with the "School of Night"--a
cabal of advanced thinkers, aristocrats, and adepts--to
further the causes of exploration, colonization and
mapmaking. The Tempest was a propaganda-piece for the new
ideology, and the Roanoke Colony was its first showcase
experiment.
The alchemical view of the New World associated it with
materia prima or hyle, the "state of Nature," innocence
and all-possibility ("Virgin-ia"), a chaos or inchoateness
which the adept would transmute into "gold," that is, into
spiritual perfection as well as material abundance.
But this alchemical vision is also informed in part by an
actual fascination with the inchoate, a sneaking sympathy
for it, a feeling of yearning for its formless form which
took the symbol of the "Indian" for its focus: "Man" in
the state of nature, uncorrupted by "government." Caliban,
the Wild Man, is lodged like a virus in the very machine of
Occult Imperialism; the forest/animal/humans are invested
from the very start with the magic power of the marginal,
despised and outcaste. On the one hand Caliban is ugly, and
Nature a "howling wilderness"--on the other, Caliban is
noble and unchained, and Nature an Eden. This split in
European consciousness predates the Romantic/Classical
dichotomy; it's rooted in Renaissance High Magic. The
discovery of America (Eldorado, the Fountain of Youth)
crystallized it; and it precipitated in actual schemes for
colonization.
We were taught in elementary school that the first
settlements in Roanoke failed; the colonists disappeared,
leaving behind them only the cryptic message "Gone To
Croatan." Later reports of "grey-eyed Indians" were
dismissed as legend. What really happened, the textbook
implied, was that the Indians massacred the defenseless
settlers. However, "Croatan" was not some Eldorado; it was
the name of a neighboring tribe of friendly Indians.
Apparently the settlement was simply moved back from the
coast into the Great Dismal Swamp and absorbed into the
tribe. And the grey-eyed Indians were real--they're
still there, and they still call themselves Croatans.
So--the very first colony in the New World chose to renounce
its contract with Prospero (Dee/Raleigh/Empire) and go over
to the Wild Men with Caliban. They dropped out. They became
"Indians," "went native," opted for chaos over the appalling
miseries of serfing for the plutocrats and intellectuals of
London.
As America came into being where once there had been "Turtle
Island," Croatan remained embedded in its collective psyche.
Out beyond the frontier, the state of Nature (i.e. no State)
still prevailed--and within the consciousness of the
settlers the option of wildness always lurked, the
temptation to give up on Church, farmwork, literacy, taxes--
all the burdens of civilization--and "go to Croatan" in some
way or another. Moreover, as the Revolution in England was
betrayed, first by Cromwell and then by Restoration, waves
of Protestant radicals fled or were transported to the New
World (which had now become a prison, a place of exile).
Antinomians, Familists, rogue Quakers, Levellers, Diggers,
and Ranters were now introduced to the occult shadow of
wildness, and rushed to embrace it.
Anne Hutchinson and her friends were only the best known
(i.e. the most upper-class) of the Antinomians--having had
the bad luck to be caught up in Bay Colony politics--but a
much more radical wing of the movement clearly existed. The
incidents Hawthorne relates in "The Maypole of Merry Mount"
are thoroughly historical; apparently the extremists had
decided to renounce Christianity altogether and revert to
paganism. If they had succeeded in uniting with their Indian
allies the result might have been an
Antinomian/Celtic/Algonquin syncretic religion, a sort of
17th century North American Santeria.
Sectarians were able to thrive better under the looser and
more corrupt administrations in the Caribbean, where rival
European interests had left many islands deserted or even
unclaimed. Barbados and Jamaica in particular must have been
settled by many extremists, and I believe that Levellerish
and Ranterish influences contributed to the Buccaneer
"utopia" on Tortuga. Here for the first time, thanks to
Esquemelin, we can study a successful New World proto-TAZ in
some depth. Fleeing from hideous "benefits" of Imperialism
such as slavery, serfdom, racism and intolerance, from the
tortures of impressment and the living death of the
plantations, the Buccaneers adopted Indian ways,
intermarried with Caribs, accepted blacks and Spaniards as
equals, rejected all nationality, elected their captains
democratically, and reverted to the "state of Nature."
Having declared themselves "at war with all the world," they
sailed forth to plunder under mutual contracts called
"Articles" which were so egalitarian that every member
received a full share and the Captain usually only 1 1/4 or
1 1/2 shares. Flogging and punishments were forbidden--
quarrels were settled by vote or by the code duello.
It is simply wrong to brand the pirates as mere sea-going
highwaymen or even proto-capitalists, as some historians
have done. In a sense they were "social bandits," although
their base communities were not traditional peasant
societies but "utopias" created almost ex nihilo in terra
incognita, enclaves of total liberty occupying empty spaces
on the map. After the fall of Tortuga, the Buccaneer ideal
remained alive all through the "Golden Age" of Piracy (ca.
1660-1720), and resulted in land-settlements in Belize, for
example, which was founded by Buccaneers. Then, as the scene
shifted to Madagascar--an island still unclaimed by any
imperial power and ruled only by a patchwork of native kings
(chiefs) eager for pirate allies--the Pirate Utopia reached
its highest form.
Defoe's account of Captain Mission and the founding of
Libertatia may be, as some historians claim, a literary hoax
meant to propagandize for radical Whig theory--but it was
embedded in The General History of the Pyrates (1724-28),
most of which is still accepted as true and accurate.
Moreover the story of Capt. Mission was not criticized when
the book appeared and many old Madagascar hands still
survived. They seem to have believed it, no doubt because
they had experienced pirate enclaves very much like
Libertatia. Once again, rescued slaves, natives, and even
traditional enemies such as the Portuguese were all invited
to join as equals. (Liberating slave ships was a major
preoccupation.) Land was held in common, representatives
elected for short terms, booty shared; doctrines of liberty
were preached far more radical than even those of
Common Sense.
Libertatia hoped to endure, and Mission died in its defense.
But most of the pirate utopias were meant to be temporary;
in fact the corsairs' true "republics" were their ships,
which sailed under Articles. The shore enclaves usually had
no law at all. The last classic example, Nassau in the
Bahamas, a beachfront resort of shacks and tents devoted to
wine, women (and probably boys too, to judge by Birge's
Sodomy and Piracy), song (the pirates were inordinately
fond of music and used to hire on bands for entire cruises),
and wretched excess, vanished overnight when the British
fleet appeared in the Bay. Blackbeard and "Calico Jack"
Rackham and his crew of pirate women moved on to wilder
shores and nastier fates, while others meekly accepted the
Pardon and reformed. But the Buccaneer tradition lasted,
both in Madagascar where the mixed-blood children of the
pirates began to carve out kingdoms of their own, and in the
Caribbean, where escaped slaves as well as mixed
black/white/red groups were able to thrive in the mountains
and backlands as "Maroons." The Maroon community in Jamaica
still retained a degree of autonomy and many of the old
folkways when Zora Neale Hurston visited there in the 1920's
(see Tell My Horse). The Maroons of Suriname still
practice African "paganism."
Throughout the 18th century, North America also produced a
number of drop-out "tri-racial isolate communities." (This
clinical-sounding term was invented by the Eugenics
Movement, which produced the first scientific studies of
these communities. Unfortunately the "science" merely served
as an excuse for hatred of racial "mongrels" and the poor,
and the "solution to the problem" was usually forced
sterilization.) The nuclei invariably consisted of runaway
slaves and serfs, "criminals" (i.e. the very poor),
"prostitutes" (i.e. white women who married non-whites), and
members of various native tribes. In some cases, such as the
Seminole and Cherokee, the traditional tribal structure
absorbed the newcomers; in other cases, new tribes were
formed. Thus we have the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp,
who persisted through the 18th and 19th centuries, adopting
runaway slaves, functioning as a way station on the
Underground Railway, and serving as a religious and
ideological center for slave rebellions. The religion was
HooDoo, a mixture of African, native, and Christian
elements, and according to the historian H. Leaming-Bey the
elders of the faith and the leaders of the Great Dismal
Maroons were known as "the Seven Finger High Glister."
The Ramapaughs of northern New Jersey (incorrectly known as
the "Jackson Whites") present another romantic and
archetypal genealogy: freed slaves of the Dutch poltroons,
various Delaware and Algonquin clans, the usual
"prostitutes," the "Hessians" (a catch-phrase for lost
British mercenaries, drop-out Loyalists, etc.), and local
bands of social bandits such as Claudius Smith's.
An African-Islamic origin is claimed by some of the groups,
such as the Moors of Delaware and the Ben Ishmaels, who
migrated from Kentucky to Ohio in the mid-18th century. The
Ishmaels practiced polygamy, never drank alcohol, made their
living as minstrels, intermarried with Indians and adopted
their customs, and were so devoted to nomadism that they
built their houses on wheels. Their annual migration
triangulated on frontier towns with names like Mecca and
Medina. In the 19th century some of them espoused anarchist
ideals, and they were targeted by the Eugenicists for a
particularly vicious pogrom of salvation-by-extermination.
Some of the earliest Eugenics laws were passed in their
honor. As a tribe they "disappeared" in the 1920's, but
probably swelled the ranks of early "Black Islamic" sects
such as the Moorish Science Temple.
I myself grew up on legends of the "Kallikaks" of the nearby
New Jersey Pine Barrens (and of course on Lovecraft, a rabid
racist who was fascinated by the isolate communities). The
legends turned out to be folk-memories of the slanders of
the Eugenicists, whose U.S. headquarters were in Vineland,
NJ, and who undertook the usual "reforms" against
"miscegenation" and "feeblemindedness" in the Barrens
(including the publication of photographs of the Kallikaks,
crudely and obviously retouched to make them look like
monsters of misbreeding).
The "isolate communities"--at least, those which have
retained their identity into the 20th century--consistently
refuse to be absorbed into either mainstream culture or the
black "subculture" into which modern sociologists prefer to
categorize them. In the 1970's, inspired by the Native
American renaissance, a number of groups--including the
Moors and the Ramapaughs--applied to the B.I.A. for
recognition as Indian tribes. They received support from
native activists but were refused official status. If they'd
won, after all, it might have set a dangerous precedent for
drop-outs of all sorts, from "white Peyotists" and hippies
to black nationalists, aryans, anarchists and libertarians--
a "reservation" for anyone and everyone! The "European
Project" cannot recognize the existence of the Wild Man--
green chaos is still too much of a threat to the imperial
dream of order.
Essentially the Moors and Ramapaughs rejected the
"diachronic" or historical explanation of their origins in
favor of a "synchronic" self-identity based on a "myth" of
Indian adoption. Or to put it another way,
they named themselves "Indians." If everyone who wished
"to be an Indian" could accomplish this by an act of self-
naming, imagine what a departure to Croatan would take
place. That old occult shadow still haunts the remnants of
our forests (which, by the way, have greatly increased in
the Northeast since the 18-19th century as vast tracts of
farmland return to scrub. Thoreau on his deathbed dreamed of
the return of "...Indians...forests...": the return of the
repressed).
The Moors and Ramapaughs of course have good materialist
reasons to think of themselves as Indians--after all, they
have Indian ancestors--but if we view their self-naming in
"mythic" as well as historical terms we'll learn more of
relevance to our quest for the TAZ. Within tribal societies
there exist what some anthropologists call mannenbunden:
totemic societies devoted to an identity with "Nature" in
the act of shapeshifting, of becoming the totem-animal
(werewolves, jaguar shamans, leopard men, cat-witches,
etc.). In the context of an entire colonial society (as
Taussig points out in
Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man) the shapeshifting
power is seen as inhering in the native culture as a whole--
thus the most repressed sector of the society acquires a
paradoxical power through the myth of its occult knowledge,
which is feared and desired by the colonist. Of course the
natives really do have certain occult knowledge; but in
response to Imperial perception of native culture as a kind
of "spiritual wild(er)ness," the natives come to see
themselves more and more consciously in that role. Even as
they are marginalized, the Margin takes on an aura of
magic. Before the whiteman, they were simply tribes of
people--now, they are "guardians of Nature," inhabitants of
the "state of Nature." Finally the colonist himself is
seduced by this "myth." Whenever an American wants to drop
out or back into Nature, invariably he "becomes an Indian."
The Massachusetts radical democrats (spiritual descendents
of the radical Protestants) who organized the Tea Party, and
who literally believed that governments could be abolished
(the whole Berkshire region declared itself in a "state of
Nature"!), disguised themselves as "Mohawks." Thus the
colonists, who suddenly saw themselves marginalized vis-·-
vis the motherland, adopted the role of the marginalized
natives, thereby (in a sense) seeking to participate in
their occult power, their mythic radiance. From the Mountain
Men to the Boy Scouts, the dream of "becoming an Indian"
flows beneath myriad strands of American history, culture
and consciousness.
The sexual imagery connected to "tri-racial" groups also
bears out this hypothesis. "Natives" of course are always
immoral, but racial renegades and drop-outs must be
downright polymorphous-perverse. The Buccaneers were
buggers, the Maroons and Mountain Men were miscegenists, the
"Jukes and Kallikaks" indulged in fornication and incest
(leading to mutations such as polydactyly), the children ran
around naked and masturbated openly, etc., etc. Reverting to
a "state of Nature" paradoxically seems to allow for the
practice of every "unnatural" act; or so it would appear
if we believe the Puritans and Eugenicists. And since many
people in repressed moralistic racist societies secretly
desire exactly these licentious acts, they project them
outwards onto the marginalized, and thereby convince
themselves that they themselves remain civilized and pure.
And in fact some marginalized communities do really reject
consensus morality--the pirates certainly did!--and no doubt
actually act out some of civilization's repressed desires.
(Wouldn't you?) Becoming "wild" is always an erotic act,
an act of nakedness.
Before leaving the subject of the "tri-racial isolates," I'd
like to recall Nietzsche's enthusiasm for "race mixing."
Impressed by the vigor and beauty of hybrid cultures, he
offered miscegenation not only as a solution to the problem
of race but also as the principle for a new humanity freed
of ethnic and national chauvinism--a precursor to the
"psychic nomad," perhaps. Nietzsche's dream still seems as
remote now as it did to him. Chauvinism still rules OK.
Mixed cultures remain submerged. But the autonomous zones of
the Buccaneers and Maroons, Ishmaels and Moors, Ramapaughs
and "Kallikaks" remain, or their stories remain, as
indications of what Nietzsche might have called "the Will to
Power as Disappearance." We must return to this theme.
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