Cut-Eye and Suck-Teeth: African Words and Gestures in New World Guise

IN THE NEW WORLD, THINGS AFRICAN are usually associated with the unusual and the exotic. Thus cumfa, with its frenzied drumming, would seem a natural candidate for inclusion in any list of African survivals. So also would a folktale or folksong which included several lines of obscure incantation. Or a word which made use of very un-English phonotactics, like kpoli, or was matched against a more standard equivalent (nyam versus eat). Our suspicions would be particularly aroused if the cultural or linguistic item were rarely used, if, for instance, we got it for the first and only time from the aging grandchild of some erstwhile slave, now living an isolated life far from the masses of the people. For academics and laymen alike, it is of such stuff that true New World Africanisms are made. In keeping with this pattern of intuition and reasoning, we never attached any historical significance to cut-eye and suck-teeth. The gestures to which these refer are performed daily in our native Guyana by all kinds of people, in urban center and rural area alike. And the compounds we use to describe them could hardly be more ordinary, composed as they are of simple English words-cut, eye, suck, and teeth. With such unpromising clues to go by, it is hardly surprising that we used them everyday without giving any thought to their source. However, while doing graduate work in Philadelphia in 1971, we happened to notice a curious division between American Whites and Blacks with respect to these very gestures. While the Blacks would cut their eyes and suck their teeth in much the same way that people did in our native community, Whites apparently never did, and were often ignorant of the meanings of these gestures when they were directed at them. On the basis of this chance observation, we began to consider the possibility that both the gestures and the words we used to describe them