Funky Friday: Titanic

Damn! I forgot this was here. I shoulda' pulled it out after Sandy. And if you're curious about the roots of hip-hop, here they are. Some of them.

During the Katrina fiasco I went cruising the web for a copy of "Titanic," thinking it an appropriate way of memorializing that occasion. Now that BP has elected to foul the Gulf of Mexico, "Titanic" is once again appropriate.

What is "Titanic"?

"Titanic" is a toast, a form of boasting narrative in the African-American oral tradition that is a precursor to rap and hip-hop. If you go to this YouTube video you can hear Rudy Ray Moore recite a version from Dolomite.

Toasts were discovered by scholars in the late 1960s, but they are undoubtedly much older. The "Titanic" toast is about, well, the sinking of the Titanic. As I say in the final chapter of Beethoven’s Anvil:

After the Titanic sank in 1912, blacks began reciting a narrative poem in which a mythic black boiler man, Shine, escapes from the sinking ship and swims safely ashore. The ship’s captain attempts to keep Shine on board, first offering him money and then offering the sexual favors of white women, including his own daughter. Shine rejects all offers and remains steadfast in his determination to swim ashore. The poem thus rejects white evaluation of black character by depicting a white authority figure as being so depraved as to offer his daughter up to a boiler man for no rational purpose. This obsession, it implies, is a white folks’ problem and it’s about time they dealt with it.

More obviously, "Titanic" is also about white arrogance, the arrogance that believed the Titanic to be unsinkable, the arrogance that believed an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico couldn’t fail or, if it did, failure wouldn’t cause nasty problems.

The version of "Titanic" I present below is by Afthur Pfister (aka Professor Arturo) and was collected by Louisiana Voices. You can find a more elaborate version at ChickenBones: A Journal.

Shine and the Titanic

I'm a weaver of the word, not a maker of rhyme
But I'm going to tell you the story about my man, my main man Shine.
It was a helluva day in the merry month of May,
Shine was the stoker on the Titanic that day
When a big iceberg come a floatin' their way.

Shine said, "Cap'n Charley, Cap'n Charley, there's a big iceberg floatin' our way."
Cap'n said, "Shine, Shine, don't you be no clown,
I got ninety-nine pumps to pump the water down.
I got pumps made of pipes and chumps to pump.
I got a trillion dollar load I ain't going to dump."

Shine said, "Cap'n Charley, Cap'n Charley, if you look now,
There's a whole lot of ice comin' 'cross the bow.
I ain't never read a book, ain't never been to school,
But Louzeeanna Annie ain't never raised a fool."
Shine said that to himself.

Cap'n Charley said, "Shine, Shine don't you know my might?
Anything I say and do is right.
You work for Cap'n Charley when the sun comes up
You brings my favorite slippers and my coffee cup.
You work for Cap'n Charley, stokin' the coal.
You work for Cap'n Charley and I owns your soul.
You might be a Christian and pray to the Lord,
But on the Titanic, I outranks God."

Yo Mama! Interpretation and Pattern Matching

There was a time when interpretation was the most vexed issue in literary criticism: What do texts mean? How do we figure them out? Is there only one valid interpretation, or many? As far as I can tell the debates have largely subsided without having been resolved. For better or worse, critics simply go about the business of offering interpretations without debating whether or not, or how, it is proper to do so.

I have little desire to reopen those discussions. Rather, I want to suggest that the relationship between a text and its interpretation is one of pattern congruence. A pattern in the source text matches one in the interpretive text and so the latter is said to interpret the former. But one could run it the other way, using the literary text to interpret some other text, or set of events. That’s what I want to do in this post.

Rather than using a literary text, let’s use this simple cartoon by Nina Paley:

Paley titled the strip “Timing.” When I published it here a couple of days ago I gave it a different title “Mubarak to Egyptions.” That is, I gave it an interpretive title. Or, if you will, I asserted that Paley’s cartoon is a useful way of interpreting certain recent events and statements.

What I had in mind, of course, was Mubarak’s assertion that, while he was tired and ready to step down, he feared that Egypt would descend into chaos if abdicated his responsibilities as leader. So I am interpreting Mimi – the creature who falls and crashes – as Egypt. Mubarak therefore must be Eunice, the one who helpfully stretches her hands out and offers to catch. But, alas, is too late.