NATIONALISTIC MYOPIA


 a new and conscious awareness which cannot too easily or for very
 long be placated with platitudes, still less with idealisms which in the
 past have availed nothing. We must then accept as essential to our
 salvation that we recognize that this country has a destiny of its own
 separate and distinct from the destiny of any other country. (100-101)

But Edna Manley's sculptural series does more than prefigure, intro-
duce, illustrate, and symbolize Norman Washington Manley's verbal
expression of a national Jamaican awakening. The sculptural series
resurfaces Jamaicans' repressed memories and desires by reappropri-
ating three Old Testament mythological concepts, as expressed by Hans
Kohn: "the idea of a chosen people, the emphasis on a common stock
of memory of the past and of hopes for the future, and finally, national
messianism" (qtd. in Brennan 59). Negro Aroused awakens black Ja-
maican consciousness by setting Africa as the "zero-point or starting
point" of Jamaican national history, which "allows ritual repetition, the
ritualization of memory" (Debray 27).9 With Africa as the starting point,
both lower and middle class Afro-Caribbean Jamaicans become the
chosen people of the Jamaican nation.
 The Prophet/Pocomania syntagma completes the Jamaican nation-
alist, mythological triad: it binds Pocomania with messianic power. Situ-
ating Pocomania after Prophet, and Prophet after Negro Aroused, trans-
forms actions associated with pocomania named base, erotic, and de-
monic into a chosen nation's sustaining, sacred, and messianic ritual
actions and beliefs. The series neutralizes middle-class orthodox Chris-
tian notions of respectability by naturalizing pocomania's actions and
beliefs. As a result, pocomania becomes the potentially unifying and
nationalistic means to a utopic, unified, and imperially independent
nation-state.
 Dialogue surrounding the first sounding of the word pocomania in
Marson's play, reflects middle-class, orthodox Christian perspectives
of pocomania.10 David, a "typical West Indian doctor," speaks the word
pocomania first to explain the "strange behavior" of the woman he
loves (2.2).11 "It's pocomania," David tells Reverend Peter Craig, "a very


 9 Regis Debray's words, quoted from Brennan, p. 51.
 10 I say "sounding" because the title Pocomania tells the theatre audience they
"see" traces of pocomania represented on stage before they hear a character speak
the word.
 1 The quoted text comes from the character descriptions listed at the beginning
of Marson's play.