Hamlet (RSC,2016) and representations of diasporic blackness

Introduction

In 2016 Paapa Essiedu, a British actor of Ghanaian ancestry, starred as Hamlet on the UK stage in Simon Godwin’s lauded production for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), set in a ‘modern African state’, republic, or ‘post-colonial setting’ with an almost entirely black and multicultural ethnic cast, ¹ winning the award for Best Performance in a Play at the UK Theatre Awards of 2016. Reviewers and audiences acclaimed the production as a whole for its originality, which ‘ma[de] you feel…that you are experiencing [the play] anew’ and for Essiedu’s authenticity in a character whose ‘wit and cockiness…also conveys his pain and vulnerability’. ² The production translated the play to an imagined newly liberated post-colonial African republic in the 1970s, and began with Hamlet earning his degree at Wittenberg before the ceremony was rudely interrupted by the news of a coup and sudden summons back to his country. The production mingled ‘traditional West African attire’ (worn by the ghost of Hamlet’s father), 1970s Afro-funk fashion (Laertes’s hair with its Jheri curl or loose permanent wave), elaborate military uniforms (Claudius as a stern general, the Player in ragged mock officer’s garb and the clinking medals of triumphant Fortinbras), and brightly coloured Carnivalesque overalls, skirts, shirts and trousers; Caribbean ‘graveside calypsos’, solemn church hymnals and tinny radio disco; death by sudden revolver (Polonius shot right through the arras) and by South African ‘stick fighting’ rendered treacherously sharp; rhythmic, ritualised mime and dance; and most prominently, the ‘vibrant…faces’ and ‘subversive graffiti art’ of 1970s African American New York artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–88). ³ Actors’ accents varied from the Jamaican patois of the male gravedigger who deployed a human femur as a mock-microphone to the upper-middle-class British English of Hamlet’s white college friends, Rosencrantz and (a female) Guildenstern, to the African-accented English of Marcellus in the opening scene and to the London intonation of Gertrude and her son. The casting of Sri Lankan actor Hiran Abeysekera as Horatio added another diasporic element to the production by alluding to the large historic presence of Indian or South Asian immigrants in both the Caribbean and post/colonial African nations, turning Claudius into a potential ghost of Idi Amin.

Some reviewers deprecated the play’s setting in a ‘vaguely military African state’ and found its ‘colour-blind casting…sometimes…tokenistic’ or even to be ‘conveyor-belt Shakespeare with multicultural knobs on’. ⁴ One reviewer even dismissed with disgust the ‘endless thumping Afro drums’. ⁵ We contend, however, that the production mixed these multiple referents of blackness (Eastern African, West African, Caribbean, South African, 1970s African American) in order deliberately to create an imaginary post-colonial domain where these different kinds of diasporic blackness engaged with each other through the figure of Hamlet and his art. Our article therefore examines how the concept of race changes with the transatlantic or transnational movement among spaces within this production.

Essiedu himself said of the play’s setting in an interview that the story still took place in Elsinore, in Denmark, ‘But it’s our Denmark, it’s our Elsinore’. ⁶ Such an assertion of the play’s Northern European setting might seem counter-intuitive, given the casting, music and property choices of this production. But this Denmark was not counter-intuitive as much as counter-historical, or counter-factual. Rather than centre whiteness within the production, the RSC’s colour-blind and colour-conscious casting and multicultural references engaged in a project of ‘world-making’, creating an alternate universe where, as Kevin Duong has argued in a different context, multiple concepts of difference – in this case, multiple diasporic expressions of blackness – meet in an imaginary aesthetic and political space – the space of carnival – where race is taken out of the equation. ⁷

We find in Goodwin’s Hamlet a future space of blackness that enables the audience to revisit the historical treatment of blackness in various historical and particularly post-colonial contexts. As Ekow Eshun notes in his essay ‘A Place to Call Home’, ‘What else is there to do when you have no home after all, but to create a place of your own? A home defined less by geography than by will and imagination’. ⁸ Duong writes about the spaces for identity-formation and coalition-building among intersecting oppressed groups (to adopt Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality) that appear when we imagine future identities and ways of being that do not yet exist. ⁹ We parallel the ‘utopian’ ‘queer world-making’ Duong advocates as a model for intersectional politics to the practices of Black, Asian and Multi-Ethnic (BAME) science-fiction and fantasy writers in world-building and of performers in Diasporic Carnival: developing imaginary, coherent, sustainable, as-yet-unthought-of race, ethnic, gender, sexual orientation and other categories of difference, and creating this world through artistic performance, of building what Paul Gilroy has called a ‘transfigurative polity’. ¹⁰

Diaspora and world-building

The production’s multi-ethnic cast, composed of mostly black British actors, represented within the play a diverse cross-section of the African diaspora, particularly in the Americas. Through a combination of cultural cues such as accent, dress, music and stage settings, the audience could identify characters from sites such as 1970s West Africa, East Africa, the Anglophone Caribbean (specifically Jamaica) and the United States. Allusions to the United States reveal connections to Caribbean communities there as well, particularly Hispanophone and Francophone, through the frank evocation of US-born painter and graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and his Haitian and Puerto Rican parentage and cultural influences.

Such diversity is purposeful, connecting in one sense to the range of African diasporic influences that the production of the play presents as foundational for this interpretation of Hamlet. This production, as evidenced textually by its retention of Hamlet’s major speeches about the revenger Pyrrhus (in the encounter with the actors) and his ‘’Tis now the very witching time of night’ soliloquy at length; FTLN 2320), emphasises the long and sorry consequences of the abuses of colonial power, and connects this deep history to Hamlet’s concerns with power, loss, grief, familial relationships, love, betrayal, justice and revenge. ¹¹ These concerns derive from contemporary scholarly understandings of diaspora itself. Traditional definitions of diaspora point to its etymological roots in the Greek word diasporein (‘from dia, “across” and –sperien, “to”’) referring to the sowing or scattering of seeds. ¹² By extension, the original context of diaspora – the Jewish exile from Babylon after the birth of Christ and the later African diaspora (represented through the slave trade from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries) – specifically refers to ‘communities of people dislocated from their native homelands through migration, immigration, or exile as a consequence of colonial expansion, but etymologically suggests the (more positive) fertility of dispersion, dissemination and the scattering of seeds’. ¹³ These original understandings of diaspora emphasised the consequences and particular impacts of such separation from the homeland and resultant dislocation on diasporic subjects, including the physical and psychological results of separation and adaptation to new environments. Critics anchored Diasporan subjects to a physical and symbolic ‘homeland’ and often framed their studies around processes of separation, adaptation, nostalgia, cultural recuperation and assimilation.

As contemporary scholars such as Gilroy have noted, however, such definitions seemingly essentialised diasporic communities by prioritising a shared racial descent, history, national identity and cultural heritage as common denominators for African Diasporic subjects regardless of their ultimate sites of arrival in the New World. ¹⁴ Nonetheless, using Salman Rushdie’s memorable phrase ‘imaginary homelands’ as anchors creates one understanding of ‘cultural identity’ that according to Stuart Hall ‘reflect[s] the common historical experiences and shared cultural codes which provide us, as “one people”, with stable, unchanging, and continuous frames of reference and learning, beneath the shifting divisions and vicissitudes of our actual history’. ¹⁵

Late twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship and debate on diaspora, conducted in disciplines ranging from anthropology, sociology, history and political studies, to ethnic, area and communication studies, has emphasised the need to consider historical and cultural specificity as a way of recognising the consequences of diaspora not through homogeneity or as ‘an epistemological or historical category of analysis’ (emphasis ours). ¹⁶ Rather, it emphasises the multiplicity and fluidity that are part of an ongoing process. Hall himself prioritises ‘becoming’ as well as ‘being’, phenomenology alongside ontology, in the creation and sustenance of ‘cultural identity’:

[Cultural identity]…belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history and culture. Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised past, they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power. Far from being grounded in a mere ‘recovery’ of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which, when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity, identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past. ¹⁷

Travel, traffic and trade form and inform diasporic subjects, who ‘are marked by hybridity and heterogeneity-cultural, linguistic, ethnic, national – and…defined by a traversal of the boundaries demarcating nation and diaspora’. ¹⁹ Moreover, these ‘diasporic subjects experience double (and even plural) identifications that are constitutive of hybrid forms of identity ²⁰ ; hybrid national (and transnational) identities are positioned with other identity categories and severed from an essentialised, nativist identity that is affiliated with constructions of the nation or homeland’. ²¹ Other scholars have highlighted this sense of flux or contingency by re-evaluating diaspora in light of concepts such as ‘métissage’, ‘critical dialogism’, ‘syncretism’ and the ‘politics of transfiguration’. ²² ‘Métissage’ refers to the process of cultural mixing in order to develop a new national identity. ‘Critical dialogism’ argues that the boundaries between self and other are constantly reconstituting themselves and that identities are multiple, so that concepts of race or national identity or religion, for example, cannot be considered in isolation from each other or as historically fixed but only intersectionally and contingently. ²³ ‘Syncretism’, a word with its origins in the early seventeenth century, adapts the aesthetic and cultural practices of reforming discrete traditions and practices into a new artefact as a model for nation- or coalition-building. Gilroy’s ‘politics of transfiguration’ is ‘played, danced, acted, and sung’, in the voices and through the bodies of resisters even as they simultaneously strive for the ‘politics of fulfilment’ of white bourgeois and colonial material wealth. The politics of transfiguration co-creates this polity through artistic and cultural expression that can seem ‘opaque’ to the ‘overseers’ who paradoxically engendered it, and such transfiguration can be utopian and transformative for both oppressed and dominated groups. ²⁴

In this sense, Gilroy’s transfigurative polity creates a space for intersectional world-building or world-making. The representations of characters from diverse points of the African diaspora in Godwin’s Hamlet in particular are therefore representations of contemporary understandings of diaspora. Hybridity and ‘critical dialogism’ serve not only as critiques of colonial and in some cases persistent post-colonial binarisms, but the ‘politics of transfiguration’, manifested through artistic and creative production, informs representations of the multiple, ‘lived experiences of diasporic subjects’. ²⁵

Beyond a representation of these ‘lived experiences’ in relation to (specific) multiple African diasporic (post-colonial) historical realities, Godwin’s Hamlet also sets the stage for a creation of relationships between these characters and subjects that extends beyond the confines of historical reality, by creating a space (both physical and metaphorical) and by extension, a world whereby they not only coexist but interact as part of the negotiations of the dynamics ranging from loss and power to revenge and justice mentioned earlier. Such a political, cultural space is enacted through the creation of a hybrid world whereby these plural subjects interact in ways that reveal the possibilities of expanded articulations of diasporic blackness and its tensions. ²⁶ It is a type of world-building/world-making, therefore, that as such connects it to the kinds of constructions of ‘alternate worlds’ and ‘alternate societies’ that belong to science fiction and on a larger scale to speculative fiction in general.

Definitions of science fiction abound, especially with regard to fantasy and speculative fictional genres. Speculative fiction as a genre historically centred on social and political commentary and imagined about the possibilities, impact of and responses to social, cultural and technological changes. At the same time, such fiction speculates about the potentialities of the present in addition to commenting on the past. ²⁷ We can expand the genre of speculative fiction to include all literature taking place in a slightly different universe than our own, ²⁸ thus incorporating ‘science fiction, fantasy, gothic, horror, utopian and dystopian fiction’. ²⁹ As Nalo Hopkinson observes in her interview with Alondra Nelson, speculative fiction and the world-building or world-making of its authors allows such writers, to ‘tell us stories about our lives with our creations’. In the case of fantastical fiction Hopkinson notes that it allows her to ‘intervene in the readers’ assumptions by creating a world in which standards are different’. ³⁰ Moreover, locating speculative fiction relative to discourses of power centres the stories of ‘the Other’, so that in creating such worlds the author refuses to ‘write yet another plea to the dominant culture for justice…instead…[she] simply set[s] the story of the “othered” people front and centre and talk[s] about [their] lives and concerns’. ³¹

Collaboration and creativity: Carnival as transfigurative polity

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is already an artist: we see him act a speech from a favourite play ‘well spoken, with good accent and good discretion’ (FTLN 1555–6), learn of his original verse composition for the Players, ‘a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines’ (FTLN 1631–2) and hear Ophelia’s eulogy for his seemingly forsaken ‘courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword’ (FTLN 1862–3). ³² The play presents Hamlet’s impassioned exhortation to his mother in the so-called ‘closet scene’ through a comparison of two ‘picture[s]’, one a godlike ‘Hyperion’, the other a ‘satyr’, one a ‘fair mountain’, the other a barren ‘moor’ (FTLN 2499–2513). ³³ Michael Almereyda’s film adaptation (2000) of Hamlet presented the play’s interest in expressive artistic talents in newer media, turning Ethan Hawke’s princeling business scion into an aspiring filmmaker, the Mousetrap into avant-garde video-art, and Ophelia into a photographer. As mentioned earlier, Godwin’s production foregrounds Hamlet’s creativity through explicit parallels it makes between Hamlet and the renowned historical black New York graffiti and collage artist Basquiat.

Basquiat came to fame in the late 1970s through his graffiti art, which consisted of spray-painted mottos or tags writ large in public, on New York subway trains and other places. As his fame grew, he moved into collage, painting and other media, often deploying Puerto Rican and Haitian elements derived from his parents’ backgrounds alongside his own childhood experiences growing up in New York, as well as from Aztec, Greek, Pan-African, Roman and Latinx influences that he acquired in adulthood from reading and from friends. Basquiat’s later paintings and collages maintained the fusion of visual art and text first created through his graffiti tags and also through his ‘biting commentary’ on black diaspora. ³⁴ Godwin’s production sets up Hamlet as a version of Basquiat in several ways, through Hamlet’s ‘subversive graffiti art’, ³⁵ including the defacement of his uncle’s state portrait with the spray-painted crown that appears throughout his notebooks and on many of his paintings; Essiedu’s paint-splattered appearance, especially as remediated through Julian Schnabel’s cult film Basquiat (1996); and the connection of artistic creativity to an antic disposition, or incipient madness (in Basquiat’s case, to an increasingly uncontrollable heroin addiction). Basquiat died young and mysteriously; so does Prince Hamlet. But the stronger parallel may manifest through the desire of both to challenge the political establishment through an art that is public and that combines word and image.

Perhaps more provocatively, however, the production enables ALL actors and characters to become co-creators. It uses particularly specific and nuanced forms of art (music, painting, graffiti, tattooing, gesture) to locate this creative expression within a carnivalesque, diasporic blackness. Mikhail Bakhtin provides a germinal analysis of the carnivalesque, which manifests as ‘the world turned upside down’, the elevation of the lowly above the high as Lords and Ladies of Misrule (in great feudal houses and in the masquerade tradition within carnival); the coming together of unruly and unfamiliar groups of people within a shared public space; blasphemy or taboo social or religious behaviours that are condoned during this special time of license, even if they are normally condemned; and the clash of binary opposites, often taking the opposite part (men dressed as women, women dressed as men, kings dressed as clowns, commoners dressed as lords and so on). ³⁶ Bakhtin locates the origin of the carnivalesque within the Medieval Feast of Fools (which later developed into our Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday), and argues that later practices or celebrations cannot access the participatory wildness of true carnival except perhaps in the riotous, ‘dialogic’ or ‘polyphonic’ voices within the novels of Dostoyevsky. ³⁷

Social historians of early modern England and folklorists such as C. L. Barber or François Laroque identify carnivalesque elements within English folk traditions such as May Day dancing or the Twelfth Night celebrations in which noble lords and ladies took their servants’ part and crowned their servants the ‘Lord and Lady of Misrule’. ³⁸ They suggest that ‘Shakespeare’s Festive World’ (to borrow the title of one of Laroque’s books) participates in this unruly and creative sense of carnival in a deep structural way (the very title of Twelfth Night being exemplary). Whereas these scholars had, for the most part, suggested that carnival offered only a temporary respite from elitist and oppressive power structures in feudal or mercantile cultures, Michael Bristol argues that even the delimited holiday or holy-day in early modern England allowed common people to arrest, challenge, imagine and enact authority and authoritarian institutions as contingent and changeable. ³⁹ Bristol parallels carnival and theatre as public and folk spaces for a creative inquisition into the political hegemonies of Elizabethan England. Carnival and theatre allowed groups to coalesce around a shared creative act of cultural production that imagined a new political world. More recently, Phyllis Gorfain writes of carnival in Hamlet that the ‘ludic performances’ of dialogic activities such as word games, tricks, metatheatre, riddling, jokes, and even Ophelia’s songs and madness and so on inset within the play allow it to participate in carnival despite the play’s tragic outcome. ⁴⁰ Through its riddling and meta-fictionality (the mirror-like repetition of multiple revengers: Pyrrhus/Hamlet/Lucianus/Fortinbras/Laertes, for example, redacted through speech and dumbshow), the play turns ‘playing’ into ‘metacommunication’, at once casting blame and removing itself from responsibility.

Godwin’s production bears out Gorfain’s thoughtful insights about carnival, misrule and dialogism in Hamlet through its costuming and its relationships to art. Essiedu’s Hamlet spray-paints a hot pink crown (the ‘Basquiat crown’) on a state portrait of Gertrude and Claudius in full regalia and signs it ‘H’, as Basquiat tagged his own early spray-painted mottos ‘SAMO’. Carnival functions as metacommunication most effectively in the play’s encounters with the Players during both the ‘Pyrrhus’ speech and the Mousetrap, and in the gravediggers’ scene, although key scenes with both Ophelia and Gertrude likewise heighten our awareness of the limits of Western textuality and knowledge-production.

The Pyrrhus speech in this production becomes in effect a dumbshow, one that replaces the Mousetrap’s dumbshow, which is cut. In the Pyrrhus scene, the Players enter wearing multicoloured clothing reminiscent of Caribbean carnival, wheeling in a bicycle and loudly sounding whistles as they dance. When Hamlet begins the speech, they sit around him and listen intently, especially as, during his false start, he picks up a horned African dance mask and holds it up (‘head to foot’ [FTLN 1545]), points at it (‘baked…impasted’ [FTLN 1548]), looks at it, and addresses it (‘eyes like carbuncles’ [FTLN 1552]), and makes it turn to him and turn around, as if it is alive or as if he has incarnated revenge itself. Taking over from Hamlet, the Player continues this hallucinatory, evocative utterance, delivering his speech to another actor, now standing, also holding a half-black and half-white mask to represent Priam. Hamlet himself continues to mouth the words of the speech, tearful and vacant, as an African drum sounds on ‘dreadful thunder’ to announce revenge (FTLN 1575). Despite Polonius’s facetious interruption (‘[M]oblèd queen is good’ [FTLN 1593]), the actress playing the mobled queen walks with mute dignity across the stage and slowly offers the diadem in mime before doubling up in a silent gestural slow-motion clamour of grief on ‘passion in the gods’ (FTLN 1608). The actress weeps – again silently – as Hamlet notes – and the interlude establishes the dumbshow as a genuinely moving and figurative expression of sorrow.

In every instance with the Players, the stagehands and servants join the drummers and participate in the music and art, as if to emphasise the mutual and immersive nature of carnival. In the Mousetrap, the Players wear a mixture of African, Caribbean and ‘hacked’ or ‘found’ historical Elizabethan clothing. Hamlet himself watches the play while wearing a crocodile head-dress that he has fabricated from trash. The Player Queen wears a multicoloured ruff, a cardboard crown and leather elbow-high gloves; the Player King wears a braided blue jacket and pushes a multicoloured walker (decorated with duct tape). The speeches are punctuated with dancing and drumming. Past and present, old worlds and new, come together in surprising ways in this fantastical yet fully realised environment. Hamlet laughs for joy at Claudius’s sudden departure, but in his shouted response to Guildenstern with the recorders (a scene that is kept in its entirety) we hear again about the vital importance of play and for whom we play: ‘Though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me’ (FTLN 2302–3) returns the prince to his erstwhile friend. For the purposes of this essay we can only briefly mention the other ways in which the production creates metatheatre or carnivalesque metacommunications that challenge our expectations of reality and the visible world. Gertrude (Tanya Moodie) sees Hamlet’s Ghost but denies that she has done so. The Ghost is thus both real and unreal in perhaps an allusion to African animist beliefs and ancestor-worship that travelled to post-colonial and diasporic communities. Gertrude resolutely turns away her face and will not see, but Hamlet, and the audience, know that she can no longer sustain the fiction in which she has been living. Ophelia (Natalie Simpson) exposes conventional femininity and female responses as Western fictions, too. She was played as grief-stricken but furious, running directly at Gertrude with tears rolling down her face but also shouting at the top of her voice. In her second entrance, she is gripped by full-fledged trichotillomania, tearing out her hair and handing hanks of it to bystanders instead of flowers. Her race and her gender intersect to produce an alternative to passive, white femininity and to conventional performances of Ophelia. Simpson’s Ophelia makes her onstage audience complicit in her rage and suffering by demanding that they join her in song (textually accurate but rarely insisted upon in performances) and by grabbing Claudius’s hand and putting it on her breast, to his horror and shame: a dramatic enactment of how power abused makes women mad.

The gravediggers’ scene perhaps received most reviewer attention. The diggers, one male, one female, enter to joyful calypso as the female gravedigger sings and dances. The female gravedigger wears a green-and-yellow shell-suit jacket with ‘RIO DE JANEIRO’ on the back, while the Jamaican-accented male gravedigger wears African patterned cloth. In between the female gravedigger’s calypso verses, the male gravedigger uses a human femur as a mock-microphone, the music switching to the solemn organ cadences of a hymn for a bridge section before we return to dancing calypso. The priest who officiates at Ophelia’s interment wears purple robes that remind us of the characteristic garb of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. And it is the gravediggers who make the point of this production most clearly when they comment of the body that it ‘was a woman, sir, but, rest her soul, she’s dead’ (FTLN 3538): they are very clear about death and life, and what we owe the living. They, and other playful and player characters like them, mitigate the death-driving impetus to blood-revenge that the Ghost seeks to instil in Hamlet.

Conclusion: From Elizabethan revenge to diasporic justice

In creating a diverse world of Afro-diasporic subjects through carnival, Godwin’s Hamlet takes up Nalo Hopkinson’s desire for speculative fiction to ‘manipulate the metaphorical structures of the story’. ⁴¹ It does so in part by centring the negotiations of power, love, grief, revenge and justice (among others) from the point of view of characters who would have been possibly racially and ethnically ‘othered’ in traditional Shakespeare productions (or at the least representative of a minority presence). ⁴² Godwin’s staging, however, represents these ‘minority’ subjects ‘front and centre’ to talk about ‘their lives and their concerns’ rather than to ‘plea[d] to the dominant culture for justice’. ⁴³ The stakes of this revised notion of justice become clear when we consider Hamlet in the context of early modern revenge tragedy. The young prince Hamlet seeks justice for his father’s death and his mother’s betrayal with his uncle/stepfather just as Laertes seeks justice for his father’s and sister’s deaths. But just as Shakespeare’s play challenges the notion of the vengeful son and the blood-feud through its dilatory and thoughtful hero, and instead of appealing to a dominant European or Eurocentric cultural model for justice, the play presents Afro-diasporic subjects who look for justice (as well as other goals) through a variety of actions that include different linguistic registers and cultural practices, some of which originate in Afro-diasporic historical and cultural contexts.

Most of the metacommunicative and carnivalesque moments in the play centre around ethical discussions of various kinds of justice: what is due to the dead versus what is due to the living (Hamlet’s Ghost and the gravediggers’ scene); what is due to a royal son or to a husband (the Pyrrhus scene and the Mousetrap); what is due to a widowed queen and mother (the Pyrrhus scene, the Mousetrap and the closet scenes); and what is due to old friends (the recorder scene with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern). These characters must decide for, among, and by themselves how to right/write these particular wrongs.

The creation of this Afro-diasporic world through diverse linguistic and cultural practices can also be compared to the concept of ‘jes grew’ that, as Alondra Nelson notes, is a central part of Ishmael Reed’s 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo and is inspired by James Weldon Johnson’s description of the ‘proliferation of ragtime songs, commenting that they “jes grew” (or just grew)’. ⁴⁴ As Nelson observes, in the novel, the concept of ‘jes grew’ refers to: ‘African diasporic cultures that live and evolve in the forms of gesture, music, dance, visual culture, epistemology, and language; crossing geography and generations by moving from carrier to carrier and thus threatening the knowledge monopoly of the “West”’. ⁴⁵ For Reed, although this lost text is not found by novel’s end, his belief is that the future generation will create it and thus

be successful in creating a text that can codify black culture: past, present and future. Rather than a ‘Western’ image of the future that is detached from the past…LaBas foresees the distillation of African diasporic experience, rooted in the past but not weighed down by it, contiguous yet continually transformed. ⁴⁶

Gorfain suggests that carnival ‘obscur[es] the…discriminations we use to purify the borderlines between life and death, the body and what surrounds it’. ⁴⁸ Godwin’s Hamlet uses carnival to activate a ghostly diasporic Africanist identity that cannot be pure or easily identifiable, a kind of acquired ‘political race’ that acts through coalition, to adapt Lani Guinier’s term. ⁴⁹ This identity – this ghost that cries for justice – recognises the shared complicity in crime that cruelty, colonialism and paradoxically civilisation force upon postmodern and post-colonial citizens. But during the space of carnival and theatre, we can imagine a transfigured post-colonial polity in which young men and women no longer feel they must die or kill for revenge.