Obeah(man) as trickster in Cynric Williams’ Hamel, the Obeah Man

Abstract

Cynric Williams’ Hamel, the Obeah Man (1827) is the first novel written in or about the West Indies to feature an obeah practitioner as protagonist and have that protagonist speak, at length, about himself and his beliefs. This complex treatment of obeah is remarkable, considering the threat it posed to plantation rule at the time. This article will explore how Hamel emerges as a folk hero, a figure of resistance and a trickster. Moreover, it will examine how obeah itself emerges as a “tricky,” disruptive epistemological force. As well as disrupting the narrative’s fictional plantation economy, Hamel (and the obeah he personifies) disrupts its assumptions of the very categorisation of obeah. Obeah allows Hamel sufficient discursive freedom to defy the bounds of the narrative and escape into the realm of myth. With it, he demonstrates the power of religion in the formation of West Indian identity, albeit within the confines of slavery. This article will also explore Williams’ text as a site of anxiety, a text caught between Eurocentric imperialist ideology and acknowledgement of African-Caribbean claims to selfhood. Hamel’s fluidity, which results not only from his position as an obeahman, but also from his position as a trickster, exemplifies the a priori in-between-ness of West Indian culture. Hamel is at once a representation of Williams’ imagination of what obeah might be, and a vehicle for the “unruly subject” of the real-life phenomenon of obeah itself. While the identities of trickster and obeahman are not mutually exclusive, Hamel embodies them both. Reading Hamel as at once trickster and obeahman shows not only obeah’s power of resistance to the contradictions of plantation slavery, but also positions it as both a destructive and an ultimately reconstructive cultural force unique to the islands of the Caribbean.