SPEAK OF THE ADVENT OF NEW LIGHT: JAMAICAN PROVERBS AND ANANCY STORIES 83

 Pentecostalism is concerned with the transition that changes a person
 into a saint. This ritual address to the person is consistent with a
 cosmology that proposes in rite and trickster myth that change comes
 through normative breach and not through systematic practice. The
 trick as a circumvention of hierarchy is integral to Jamaican life and
 familiar to the many Jamaicans who both scold and laud "Anansi"
 behaviour. In the realm of Jamaican Christian practice, the power of
 the possession rite stands as homologous to the trick. Both are acts
 that create a breach in a recalcitrant order. In Pentecostal rite, a
 sinner is turned into a saint, and this sinner is often a person cast as
 Africa's descendant. From the viewpoint of the orthodox Christian,
 this person stood at the base of the system, steeped in superstitious
 magic and unable to assume the "moral greatness" that a civilized
 "religion demands." This African immoralist born in concubinage
 becomes through the rites of healing and possession a Jamaican
 Pentecostal saint.1"

If what Austin-Broos describes is indeed an Anancy trick, then it's the
trick transformed perhaps even trans-substantiated by Christian
eschatology. And it is this meeting of the Anancy trick with Christian
eschatology that makes Anancy such a complicated figure in
contemporary Jamaica because, in the Pentecostal rite Austin-Broos
describes, the trick and the trickster have come apart somehow. The
trick is not limited by the trickster's own limitations by greed, spite
and deceitfulness. And this is important because it suggests that there
are two ways of reading Nancy Stories one that valorizes the trickster,
his cunning and amorality, and one that valorizes the trick while trying
to liberate the trick from the trickster.
 I think this helps to explain why there is so much debate about the
place of Anancy in Jamaican culture: can Anancy be reclaimed as a
cultural hero, or is the amoral trickster something that Jamaica needs
to leave behind? Does he represent the strength of Jamaican culture,
or its weakness? For many, including the poet Kwame Dawes Anancy
still stands as a symbol of cultural resistance. In his book Natural
Mysticism, Towards a Reggae Aesthetic, Dawes elaborates a connection
between Anancy and "such slave rebels, black rebel leaders and Maroon
warriors as Cudjoe, Nanny, Sam Sharpe, Paul Bogle, and Tacky, all
celebrated as much for their trickster qualities, their capacity to dupe


 11 Diane Austin-Broos, Jamaica Genesis, Religion and the Politics of Moral Orders
(Kingston: Ian Randle, 1997) 119-120.