“It’s enough to survive through this hell to make ourselves immortal in the eyes of our descendants:” Myal, death and mourning in Orlando Patterson’s Die the Long Day

Abstract

Die the Long Day narrates the 24 hours following the flight, capture, and brutal murder of Quasheba, a fugitive slave, on an 18th-century Jamaican plantation. Quasheba is remembered, retroactively, for her defiance of, despite ultimate defeat by, both the extreme gendered violence of the plantation and the paternalism of the narrative. The climax of this novel is Quasheba’s funeral, on which her community insists in accordance with their communal, African religious (Myal) rites. In these following pages I will consider how Quasheba’s spirit galvanizes this community as much as it may threaten to destroy it, and how this narrative places Obeah/Myal at the center of spiritual survival in the face of ever-present physical—and social—death during and after slavery, and at the center of strategies for the survival of its aftereffects.