HUGH HODGES


 Big chip, fly! little chip, fly!
 He repeat the word over an' over, but the tree don't fall yet.
 So him take up another sing again: -
 Me go to Ricky-lan-jo, eye come shine, come
 show me your motion, eye come shine
 An' Mr. Annancy never cease till him cut down the tree an' receive his
 reward.""

To what extent it is the axe doing the chopping down here, and to what
extent it's the song is unclear. What is clear is that it's the song that
either directly or indirectly enables Anancy to fell a tree that has
defeated all comers, to say in effect, "The harder they come, the harder
they fall." Similarly, in Thelwell's novel it is not Rhygin's gun battles
with the police that pose the real threat to the big tree, Babylon; it's
the songs. Ivan's exploits as a lone badman make him a popular hero,
but are finally conservative. His expulsion from society and his death
follow his rebellion against the established order with tragic
inevitability, and leave the established order ostensibly unchanged.
His songs, however, survive the tragedy, banned from the government's
radio, but sounding resistance in the yards and dancehalls of Kingston.
And that resistance is articulated very compactly in the chorus, "The
Harder they come, the harder they fall, one and all." The iniquitous
establishment, and the selfish trickster both fall. What survives them
is a voice or rather a chorus of voices that speak in proverbs. At
the end of the day, it is the people that will be left standing, and it's
their story that will be sung.
 And this points to a way of reading the trickster story in which the
trick is seen as something larger than the trickster, and altogether more
threatening to the oppressive social order. The middle and upper classes
are no doubt right when they feel that Anancy represents much that is
threatening to Jamaican society, not simply because he authorizes bad
behaviour, but because his tricks especially when they take on a life
of their own represent something powerful and hopeful.
 The trickster, then, is not really the correct paradigm for understand-
ing reggae artists. Even when Anancy is the underdog in Jamaican folk
stories, his battles are never motivated by the kind of heroism or great-
ness of spirit that one identifies with Paul Bogle, for example, or for


 23 Jekyll, "William Tell" 29. I have omitted the musical notation provided by Jekyll.