SPEAK OF THE ADVENT OF NEW LIGHT: JAMAICAN PROVERBS AND ANANCY STORIES 87

 that matter with Bob Marley or Burning Spear. He is motivated mainly
 by his stomach. Certainly the result is always a breach in the social
 order the established hierarchy is subverted, however temporarily,
 by Anancy outmaneuvering his superiors, betraying his friends or tak-
 ing advantage of his inferiors but these breaches don't lead any-
 where. There is no sense that the inversions achieved by Anancy are
 the fulfilment of some divine plan. And if there is one thing Bob Marley,
 for example, is sure of, it's that there is a divine plan.
 The chorus of Bob Marley's "Small Axe" says, "If you are the big
tree/ We are the small axe/ Sharpened to cut you down."24 These lines
are generally understood to contain a punning challenge to the three
big recording studios that dominated the Jamaican recording industry
when Marley started Tuff Gong records. Marley, the song announces,
is going to pull an Anancy trick, and steal the other studios' business.
But the context of Marley's song makes the chopping down of the
recording moguls a spiritual matter, not just a business coup, but a
blow against Babylon's system. And this is simply inconsistent with
anancyism: Anancy is motivated not by grand considerations of right
and wrong, but by his own iniquitous greed. Kwame Dawes argues that
Marley is "constructing a classic trickster song of resistance and
defiance through the sheer wit of 'brain-work',""25 but he misses the
spiritual context of the song. The song itself asserts that sheer wit and
brain-work are worthless: only divine sanction makes a trick fruitful.
In fact, without it, brain-work isn't even clever:

 Why boasteth thyself
 O evil men
 Playing smart and not being clever
 I say you are working iniquity to achieve vanity
 If a so a so
 But the goodness of Jah Jah I-dureth for I-ver.26

Without the sanction of Jah, the Anancy trick is self-defeating;
"Whosoever diggeth a pit shall fall in it," because, Jah says, "No weak
heart shall prosper." And to make sure that there's no confusion about



 24 Bob Marley, "Small Axe," Burnin', by The Wailers, Island Records, CIDM-9256,
1973.
 25 Dawes 177.
 26 Marley, "Small Axe," The Wailers, Burnin' (Island, CDM 9256, 1973).