124 ALISON J. VAN NYHUIS

of pocomania (or at least vitality) in their own lives. This absence
prompts the audience to seriously consider the possibility of resur-
recting an altered form of pocomania to benefit the Jamaican nation.
 Examining how the play juxtaposes pocomania and marriage as op-
posite equivalents clarifies how the play functions within visions of
Jamaican's imagined nation. With Stella, the play stages a transition
from marriage to "concubinage," a transition from a sanctified, socially
legitimate community to a immoral, illegitimate one. The same day
she learns of her fiance's critical condition, her father delivers what
he calls "more bad news": "A strong revivalist gang moves into our
district tonight" (1.2). Her fiance, John, dies the night the revivalist
gang penetrates Stella's district. In her newly single state, pocomania's
power appears to increase: when Stella hears the pocomania drums,
she enters a trance-like state that apparently pulls her to pocomania.
 The pocomania space seems much more rooted in African history
than her middle-class space. When Stella goes to the revivalist leader,
she queries about the drummer: "And who taught his father?" (2.1) .
Sister Kate responds, "Him puppa, dat is Josiah gran fader come here a
little boy pon slave ship from Africa" (2.1). This answer binds Stella's
desire for the drums with a desire for her ancestral history. Both liter-
ally and figuratively, the drums bring Stella closer to her African roots.
Connecting Stella with the drummer and his African grandfather offers
a more trans-class, trans-national, ancestral categorization of people
than offered by middle/lower class divisions.
 Displacing marriage with pocomania also means existing within a
more matriarchal space. Stella distances herself from the strong male
influences in her life, such as her father, "a stern Baptist Deacon," Rev-
erend Peter Craig, and David Davies, a doctor, to follow the female
revivalist leader, Sister Kate. Sister Kate even thinks matrilineally. When
Deacon Manners asks her to move her pocomania meetings, she says,
"Move? Move from me home, from me yard where me grand modder
lived before me, move Sir, it is not possible, I cannot do dat" (1.1). The
play does temper Sister Kate's leadership power by naming her "Sis-
ter" rather than "Mother," but Stella's movement from a patriarchal,
Euro-aspiring, middle class realm to a matriarchal, African-valuing,
lower class realm empowers her.17 The lower class realm embraces
rather than represses her independent, gendered, and raced self.


 17 "Mother" refers to female pocomania leaders, but "Sister" refers to the less
powerful members (Chevannes 28-29).