Belief in blue and beyond

When dancing Kromanti, the son of the priestess, who was being trained as her successor, had a kerchief thrown over his head of a blue background dotted with white stars, and his dancing consisted of a rhythmic motion of the head only, for he had one of the most powerful wɩnti of all...

The son of the priestess in this example (taken from a crucial anthropological study on Surinamese city life in 1936 by Herskovits & Herskovits 1936 had a kerchief over his head that also has a blue background with white highlights, just like Eddie Smart’s loincloth, headscarf and shoulder cloth. While I have no way of knowing how old the loincloth is, I do know that this combination of colors is charged with history.

Blue is the favorite color of the winti that dwell in the rainforest, and white that of the gods of the sky and the ancestral spirits that traveled with the slaves from Africa. The combination of blue and white is associated with Aisa, ‘mother earth’, the kindest of all winti. When a separation is needed from evil or heavy, needy wintu, then the obiaman will wear blue fabric, thereby attracting the Ampuku spirit.

Blue and white also play an important role in spiritual make-up, a mix of dots and stripes of clay and things such as washing blue, the forms depending on whether one is inviting the gods of the sky, the snake or the tiger gods. The colors are also used in spiritual baths, in liquid form or by adding the cotton fabric to the water.

Looking at my Surinamese grandmother (1928), the belief in blue, white and beyond is still very much alive, even if her generation already lost track of most of the knowledge about the inner workings and representations of the winti pantheon. Here, in this loincloth, white is added to the dark blue cloth, together communicating messages to the spirits and gods that I cannot pretend to comprehend.