Travels with Tooy: History, Memory, and the African American Imagination (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Travels with Tooy: History, Memory, and the African American Imagination Catherine Reinhardt Richard Price. 2008. Travels with Tooy: History, Memory, and the African American Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. xiv + 452 pp. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-68059-0, ISBN-10: 0-226-68059-2. Travels with Tooy is an exceptional ethnographic study of Saramaka maroon cosmology, healing practices and contemporary negotiations of life in a former French colony. The work is groundbreaking in terms of both content and form. The archival wealth resulting from Richard Price’s long-standing friendship with Tooy Alexander, one of the best-known Saramaka curers, beginning in 2000 combined with 35 years of experience with the Saramaka people of French Guiana and Suriname is an anthropological treasure trove. The text, consisting principally of conversations between Price and Tooy is further complemented and expanded with extensive notes and a coda of esoteric language. Beyond the impressive primary source material, what is even more exceptional about Travels with Tooy is Price’s unique ability to adopt the Saramaka world view in his writing style. Price communicates not only information about Saramakas but also a way of being Saramakan through the very textuality of his writing. Coming from a literary and cultural studies background myself, I will primarily focus on Price’s unique writing style. The book is divided into something one might equate to journal entries headed by a title and generally also by a date or a date span. Oftentimes the dates are realistic and represent an actual date either from a past century or from the present day. Other times the dates are a series of zeros when the journal entry pertains to the Saramaka gods, in particular the sea gods. The dates are a key element helping the reader navigate from century to century as Price’s and Tooy’s stories of the Saramakas intermingle and gradually unfold. The book begins at the beginning, in a sense, recounting the search for a Saramaka healer to cure a Martinican businessman and gamecock breeder which brings together Price and Tooy and begins their friendship and collaboration. However, as Price already explains on the second page, this situation is far from simple and plunges all the characters in the story, along with the reader, in the heart of a fantastic adventure: What a tangle! How to reconcile personal and professional ethics while trying to bridge the various worlds we inhabit. How to suspend certain kinds of disbelief while holding on to others, never forgetting [End Page 204] the inextricable links that bind modernity to magic in our present world. We are plunged into the middle of a very Caribbean imbroglio, with tentacles stretching from Haiti to Trinidad—and now to the descendants of escaped slaves in the tropical forest of Suriname, whose fame as conjurers radiates all the way to Martinique and beyond. On balance, it seems like too good a story—and too good a way of tying together the strands of our own lives—not to see how it will play out. I take the bait and promise Roland to make some phone calls and find an appropriate specialist (pp. 2–3). These few sentences foreshadow what will follow in the next 300 hundred pages. “Imbroglio” perfectly qualifies the narrative that strives to reflect the historical, social and geo-political reality of the Caribbean, both past and present. Throughout the story, the author’s writing shadows Tooy as he continuously bridges various worlds “between centuries, continents, the visible and invisible, and the worlds of the living and the dead” (p. xi). It is the relationship between these different worlds that nourishes his Dúnguláli-Óbia rites (the power that protects against Death). The fact that he can directly trace his ancestry to escaped slaves is perhaps the focal point that connects the tentacles reaching throughout the Caribbean basin, but also all the way to Africa several centuries back. Perhaps the most important key to reading Travels with Tooy is the necessity of suspending certain kinds of belief while remembering the inextricable links binding our contemporary modern world to magic. While North American and European readers may approach this book...