De Bones

by Hope Strickland

The Caribbean Society in Manchester run a series of holidays spread across the year. Some will be small trips to Blackpool, the Highlands, or a stately home. Once or twice a year they travel to a sun-soaked destination abroad: a cruise maybe or a five-star hotel by the beach. My Grandma, Ina, organises these trips from her kitchen in Northenden. I’ll perch on a high stool with a lace-trimmed cover, whilst she laughs on the phone and plies me with chicken soup or curried prawns. She makes her way through a flip-pad list of names of all the women who have signed up, as well as all those she thinks should have signed up.

I had always imagined that on these elaborate holidays they would mill around new towns, paddle in the sea, try new foods… Turns out they spend most of their time sat at tables of four in the deep shade of the hotel parasols, playing dominoes and revelling in all-inclusive cocktails.

Still from Hope Strickland’s short film, Home Soon Come, shown as part of The Portico Library’s 2020-2021 exhibition Fun & Games: Playtime, past & present. — Still from Hope Strickland’s short film, *Home Soon Come*, shown as part of The Portico Library’s 2020-2021 exhibition ***Fun & Games: Playtime, past & present***.

Dominoes, for me, represents the vibrancy and play within Jamaican communities, the melting, linguistic splits of soft patois across the table. Sitting down at a dominoes game means playing all night, knocking knees between space and place, finding your bones in the wet North of England. A history of de bones – otherwise known as dominoes – can be explored both through books from the Portico Library’s collection and the Jamaican love of the game.

Tracing the origins of dominoes leads back to oracle bone divination in early China. Divination, ‘the foretelling of future events or discovery of what is hidden or obscure by supernatural or magical means’ is extremely widespread, possibly even universal [1]. A ritual practice, it helps order experience, exemplifying a quest for certainty in an uncertain world. Whilst situated within this sense of the unknown, the otherworldly, divination is an inherently social act, often bound to a degree of social manipulation and political acumen. In fact, observed patterns in archaeological evidence allow us to establish that divination was a crucial source of state power during the late Shang Dynasty around 1250-1046 BCE [2].

Osteomancy – the reading of animal bones in order to foresee the future – was an established practice that stretched across Eurasia and North America. Animal bones were interpreted in their natural state, as pyro-osteomancy, which is the interpretation of cracks when heated, or as scapulimancy, which involved a scorching ceremony. The bones used reflect the significant roles certain animals play in human ideological and teleological systems: popular bones used during the Shang dynasty were sheep and turtle bones.

The links between dominoes and ancient osteomancy feel loose and distant when reading from a European perspective. Searching for entries on dominoes in the Portico Library’s collection, the attitude towards bone play was decidedly less venerable. Dominoes took up little space in books such as Sports and Pastimes of the People of England, and only for the author to denounce it as a vulgar sport:

Domino is a very childish sport, imported from France a few years back, and could have nothing but the novelty to recommend it to the notice of grown persons in this country.

Compared to a flattering appraisal of chess:

This noble, or, as it is frequently called, royal pastime, is said, by some authors, to have originated, together with dice-playing, at the siege of Troy; and the invention of both are attributed to Palamedes, the son of Nauplius, king of Euboea; others make Diomedes, and others, again, Ulysses, the inventor of chess.

Book 1V, 231

Dominoes listed under “sedentary games” in Glig Gamena Angel Deod, or The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England: Including the Rural and Domestic Recreations, May Games, Mummeries, Shows, Processions, Pageants, and Pompous Spectacles, Joseph … — Dominoes listed under “sedentary games” in *Glig Gamena Angel Deod, or The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England: Including the Rural and Domestic Recreations, May Games, Mummeries, Shows, Processions, Pageants, and Pompous Spectacles*, Joseph Strutt, 1801, The Portico Library collection.

Weighty books held together by cloth ties, pages light and sensitive to the touch. Fragile yet authoritarian. Gently turning the pages, in search of a game and a heritage entrenched in a steep, colonial past. The library feels both warm and lofty. Only the Georgians would so vehemently call for a classical hierarchy of even hobbies and play.

Despite the 19th-century upturned nose towards dominoes, dominoes divination continues across the African diaspora. Found in Yoruba, Ifá, Obeah and other Afro-religions, there is little scholarly documentation on the various practices of bone throwing (despite a well-established, exoticised predilection for mystifying Vodou and other syncretic religious forms found in the African diaspora). Alongside the reading of cowrie shells – diloggun – in Yoruba and amathambo or bone reading in southern Africa, there are other contexts, such as within Hoodoo, where dominoes are still used as divination tools.

If you google search ‘Hoodoo divination’ you’ll find DIY and how-to-kits for bone divination from home. The internet and public interest in unearthing links with lost cultural heritage have re-ignited a popular interest in bone divination, particularly in relation to diasporic Afro-religions. Hoodoo dice and domino divination is complex and based on numerology, astrology and methods that favour cycles and patterns. Domino reading is often done by blessing the dice, then having the seeker select a number of dominoes randomly. Each number has a different meaning attached. One, for example, references Eshu, singularity, wholeness, unity, individuality.

The shifting parameters of the game as it travels across continents and thousands of years, reveals fortunes, destinies and becomings by means other than divination proper. My experience of dominoes in the UK, is that they have far from lost their spell-making potential amongst the Caribbean community. They remain a ‘royal pastime’ at West-Indian community centres, where sets in tired wooden boxes are lovingly handled across cafeteria-style tables and plastic chairs. Elderly relatives and family friends, women with warm, lined faces, wearing a different hat for each new day. Men with worn caps, golden molars and a calm set to their gait. A square table always bright with character: heavily ringed fingers slapping down each domino; humming and whistling to the local Caribbean radio station on the knackered Hi-Fi system; rounds of patois signifyin’ the numbers, the bones, the stakes, transporting us thousands of miles away from the glum, flat skies.

The table is the boneyard, dominoes are the bones. Forget the idea of dominoes as a quiet game for children, in Jamaica it is a thriving, volatile, competitive sport. It is a game of patterns, memory, strategy and bold characters. People often play in sets of pairs across the table, using slight gestures and eye contact to convey tactic and their shared hand. Nicknames are given and claimed for signature styles, exclamations and passionate cries. The shake of the dominoes and the slam of the hand on the table is addictive for many. In the UK, it offers a meeting place: a homecoming for the Caribbean diaspora in community halls, barber shops, parks and yards.

The 18th- and 19th-century books on the Caribbean in the Portico Library’s collection often demonstrate exoticised or colonial perspectives. If you would like to begin your own research into these items and their historical significance, just email … — The 18th- and 19th-century books on the Caribbean in the Portico Library’s collection often demonstrate exoticised or colonial perspectives. If you would like to begin your own research into these items and their historical significance, just email **librarian@theportico.org.uk**.

A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, Francis Grose, 1796, The Portico Library collection. In the 18th century, the word vulgar meant ordinary, or of the people. More recent connotations of ‘bad taste’ became attached to the word in subsequen… — *A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue*, Francis Grose, 1796, The Portico Library collection.
In the 18th century, the word *vulgar* meant *ordinary*, or *of the people*. More recent connotations of ‘bad taste’ became attached to the word in subsequent centuries.

It’s hard to describe the scene of a dominoes game in standard English. The excitement is held in the twists and flicks of signifyin’ patois, rounds of call and response and rhythmic voices. In the Portico Collection, I tried to find similar examples of linguistic play, searching books such as A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue by Francis Grose and The Slang Dictionary by John Camden Hotten. Whilst these books contained wonderful turns on the English language, it would be misguided to equate patois to simply another vernacular mode of English as we know it.

Patois is inherently vocal and performative. A language in its own right. It evokes a landscape, a tradition and a community through a process of play and signifyin’. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. defines signifyin’ as a specifically black trope of (re) doubling [3]. It is a hermeneutic device within which lexical signification is self-reflexively reworked and obfuscated unless you know how to ‘play’. Gates argues, 'These tropes luxuriate in the chaos of ambiguity that repetition and difference (be that apparent difference centred in the signifier or in the signified, in the 'sound-image' or in the concept) yield in either an aural or a visual pun.' [4] Beyond literary criticism, the theorisation of signifyin’ is valuable as a performance of speech that generates, ‘a radical negotiation of the ways that (racial, behavioural or linguistic) norms are reiterated and lived’. [5]

There is a tradition throughout black history of oratorical energy, with rhetoric used as a weapon of political, intellectual warfare. Although couched in humour, through a disruption of semantic orientation, signifyin’ creates a moment of destabilisation: an opportunity for performative disobedience. Although the setting of a dominoes table may not at first appear disruptive, in light of the wider locale of a suburb in Manchester, Birmingham or Leeds, it begins to form a defiant arena.

Hear Benjamin Zephaniah on the passion, community and history of Britain's high-octane Caribbean domino clubs on BBC Sounds here. — Hear Benjamin Zephaniah on the passion, community and history of Britain's high-octane Caribbean domino clubs on **BBC Sounds** **here**.

Whilst racial prejudice has shape-shifted and matured since the Windrush days, the West Indian community experience continued marginalisation in the UK. More than a game, the slap of a domino and high loops of verbal play act as a constant demand for presence: a radical integration of anglophone Caribbean vernacular into the contemporary landscape of England.

Walking with my grandfather to lay daily bets on the races, his patois is as thick as when he first left Jamaica. The refusal to change tonal register matches the stoic character of a man who, once a mathematics teacher in Trelawny, worked the buses of South Manchester much of his life. His voice wraps around me. A statement of self, of place, lending a sweetness to England integral to both this country’s identity and my own. A dominoes slap in Northern England is nothing less than revolutionary love.

Hope Strickland is an artist-filmmaker and visual anthropologist from Manchester, UK. Her current work is concerned with archival response, Black feminist thought and postcolonial ecologies. You can watch her short film Home Soon Come during The Portico Library’s 2020-2021 exhibition Fun & Games: Playtime, past & present at www.theportico.org.uk/hope-strickland and see more of her work at www.hopestrickland.com.

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