“Africa was robbed, and the people that were taken were robbed, robbed of our names, language, culture, and any knowledge of who we were and where we came from. All that stripped, taken from us. It affects how we perceive ourselves and consequently consciously and subconsciously affects all our actions. Like that shit you hit me with, you being, what you say, Balanta? See, that’s dope as hell you know that shit. We don’t know what the hell we are besides black and the descendants of slaves. That’s where our identity begins. I like those Balanta though. Y’all kicked them peckerwoods ass, huh? I think I am one of y’all, man. I think I’m Balanta, too, my dude. I know I would a fought back. I would a been one who resisted, too.” - Cal, 13 Bars of Iron
From the title and the cover of the book, one would think that this is a typical story of a young black dude from the hood, with hood loves and hood problems, who eventually ends up behind bars. Well, it is….and it isn’t. The book’s title is actually a reference to the purchase price of slaves that departed through The Door of No Return:
“The iron was used as a form of currency. This was a commodity heavily featured in the slave trade. What you are looking at was the price of one adult male slave, 13 bars of iron. The Europeans traded iron to West Africans in this region and in return they received slaves. Iron was rare and expensive for those who lived in the coastal lands. It had to be imported from the interior of the continent, which was costly and difficult.Most of the crops produced by coastal societies prior to the slave trade were those that did not require complex tools like the ones made of iron or intensive labor, crops, such as sweet potatoes. These crops were cultivated with stone and wooden tools. The slave trade made iron more readily available in these areas; it introduced iron in larger quantities and made cultivation crops, such as rice, much easier. Rice produced larger yields and fed more people. It could also be stored for very long periods of time. Rice eventually began to emerge as a primary staple. Once this happened, it increased the demand for iron, and thus the demand for slaves.. This helped to perpetuate the slave trade. The acquisition of larger quantities of iron was a very short-sighted gain, however.”
Thus Calvin, “Cal”, the main character of 13 Bars of Iron, begins to learn about the history and experiences of his ancestors while navigating life in and around St. Louis, Missouri. Similarly, black people in America are going through the same learning process as more and more people are taking genetic tests to determine their African ancestry. The results often provoke a reading, or re-reading of African history with a focus on a specific people. Previously, without the genetic confirmation of one’s ancestral lineage, such study was unfocused and general. It was “African” studies. Imagine a descendant of the Hugenot, reading European history, and identifying with the Catholic Kings of Portugal. That is exactly the kind of confusion that exists, for example, among descendants of the Balanta, who, not knowing of their Balanta ancestry, yet having been fed a diet of “African” studies which focus on the “great” kingdoms of West Africa, identify with the Kingdom of Mali and leaders such as Mansu Musa who were the very oppressors of the Balanta. Such a general reading of African history could only help the descendants of slaves’ quest for identity reach so far. Now, new discovery of genetic ancestry identity is opening up new areas of study in history, psychology, and literature. It is not a random or coincidence that Cal says, “I think I am Balanta.” In fact the author of 13 Bars of Iron deliberately connected Cal to Balanta because of the author’s own DNA test results connected him to his Balanta ancestors. Thus, the new genetic technology has expressed itself in the novel. The explanation of the 13 bars of iron and growing rice is actual Balanta history.
What is interesting is considering the Balanta cultural survivals in 13 Bars of Iron and how reading and interpreting literature can be informed by the new genetic ancestry connection. For example, by applying the 26 Principles of the Great Belief of the Balanta Ancient Ancestors, Cal’s behavior is given a new, deeper meaning.
INTERPRETING 13 BARS OF IRON MAJOR THEMES FROM A BALANTA PERSPECTIVE.
“As a kid, I always felt as if I was destined for greatness. My mom once told me that, on the day I was born, the lady she shared a hospital room with looked at me and told her that I was going to be someone very special. She didn’t say it in the way that a person looks at a baby and says, he or she is cute just to be polite. But she stated it as if God was informing her of this directly. I felt that way about myself. I always felt like I had a mission and a definite purpose for being. I had spent much of my childhood waiting for this purpose to reveal itself.”
This sense of duty is a prominent feature of the original ancient Balanta spirituality. Principle 25 of the Great Belief of the Balanta Ancient Ancestors states,
“The notion of duty: The individual knows what his moral and legal obligations are and that they are to be honored on pain of losing his vital force. He knows that to carry out his duty will enhance the quality of his being. As a member of the clan, the ‘muntu’ knows that by living in accordance with his vital rank in the clan, he can and should contribute to the maintenance and increase of the clan by the normal exercise of his favorable vital influence. He knows his clan duties He knows, too, his duties towards other clans.”
From the very first pages of the books, Yarborough, through Cal, either consciously or unconsciously expressed this most important of Balanta epistemology. This sense of duty will figure prominently at the end of the book, where Cal experiences a crisis of conscience.
However, the obvious main theme of the book is Ca’s relationships with women. In Cal’s own words,
“After realizing my own potential as a hoe boss, I quickly bagged a couple of the baddest chicks in my high school with little effort. I kept several winners on my team at all times. Fast forward to college, I began to take my pimpin’ to the next level. I was smashing at an amazing clip, at times, doing so indiscriminately. For me, it was a numbers game. The more women I slept with, the merrier I was. . . . I possessed an uncanny self -assuredness that endeared me to most of the women I encountered.”
From the viewpoint of black American cultural experience, Cal’s behavior would be seen as the regrettable behavior of the lost young black males, the product of broken homes, absent fathers, the drug war, and ghetto glorification and the devaluation of the black woman, a horrific consequence of American Jim Crow experience.. Brandon Lundy, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Kennesaw State University, provides an alternative frame of reference directly from Balanta culture in his study, Challenging adulthood: Changing initiation rites among the Balanta of Guinea-Bissau:
“During the rites of N’hess (ages 25 to 30), the Balanta youth residing in the boys’ house (a separate household within the patrilineal compound) is given to an older married woman from outside the community known as a finangha to teach Balanta youths to konxi mudjer or ‘know women’. Married Balanta women, for their part, are in charge of initiating young men into sexu-ality, and female adultery is encouraged by men of their own descent group (see Handem 1986: 72, 90, 172), who try to convince women to have sexual intercourse with their friends. Because achieving wealth-in-people is such an important aspect of Balanta society, the children of these adulterous relations are considered as belonging to the husband’s descent group (Temudo 2009: 51)”
This re-reading of Cal’s behavior, as an unconscious survival of Balanta culture, re-defines Cal’s experience from a morally bankrupt ghetto pathology to a genetic expression of Balanta manhood situated in a hostile social reality. It requires a Balanta ontology to understand this.
The 26 Principles of the Great Belief of the Balanta Ancient Ancestors explains that traditional Balanta culture is centered in a single value: vital force. that their purpose is to acquire life, strength or vital force, to live strongly, that they are to make life stronger, or to assure that force shall remain perpetually in one’s posterity. All beings in the universe possess vital force of their own: human, animal, vegetable, or inanimate. Each being has been endowed by God with a certain force, capable of strengthening the vital energy of the strongest being of all creation: man. Supreme happiness, the only kind of blessing, is to possess the greatest vital force: the worst misfortune and, in very truth, the only misfortune, is the diminution of this power.
Consider now these quotes from Cal:
“The more women I slept with, the merrier I was.”
“After graduating from college, I found myself in a space that was unfamiliar. My stable had become bare. . . . I had no job, no money, and was feeling down on my luck.. I still had my confidence, but I was going through a down period.”
“A nice piece of ass can entirely change a niggas mood and perspective. How can life be that bad when I have one of the Most High’s greatest gits at my disposal?”
“I felt like it would be hard for any broad to turn down pimping. My confidence on a scale from 1-10 was at about a 19! I was feeling like Black Caesar when I walked through.”
“Women were my dope.”
“There’s nothing better than bedding down with a broad, even a stranger. There is no greater comfort for a nigga than a bad female.”
Cal’s behavior can thus be explained very simply: he surrounded himself with that which did the most to increase his vital life force energy. The more beautiful “bad” women he had, the more it increased his strength, confidence and happiness. Without them, his vital life force energy decreased. It was a simple, intuitive response from a Balanta ontological point of view.
Similarly, another typical young black male hood behavior pattern can be re-examined and re-defined: dropping out of high school. Perhaps the book’s most brilliant passage occurs when Cal is explaining to his girl Kim why he and Black males like him drop out of high school. When Kim says, “You lost me; you love learning, but hated school?” Cal responds:
“Let’s take a subject, any subject, seventh-grade science, for example. In that textbook you gone cover Astronomy, Physical Science, Biology, Botany, Geology, etc. By the end of the year, you will have a solid foundation and understanding of the basic principles of each of these sceinces. Then you go to high school and spend a whole year on Biology, a whole year on Physics, a whole year on Earth Science, essentially relearning the same shit you learned in the 7th grade. Now, that’s cool if you plan on becoming a Botanist or Biologist, but, if not, when you start relearning the same shit you learned when you was little, you gone eventually tune out. It’s the same for the other subjects. And tune out is what I did for four years of high school. I was barely there, and when I was there the shit they was hitting me with wasn’t stimulating me, because it wasn’t new and I wasn’t learning shit about myself there. I don’t think I learned shit the entire time I was there. I could have gone to college straight from the eight grade. . . .
You seen the minis-series ‘Roots,’ right? So you remember when Kunte Kinte was in Africa before he got caught by the slave catchers. He had just completed his manhood ritual, his rite of passage so that he could become a warrior in his tribe. This was customary in almost every West African society. The Fulani, the Wolof, Mandinka, they all had these rites of passage. In most West African cultures, by the time a boy is 15 or 16 he went through one of these rites. The learning during these rites was Socratic; the young man was tested, mentally, physically, emotionally. After demonstrating an in-depth understanding of certain principles, principles the elders deemed necessary to live, protect and govern, he was elevated from the status of boy to that of a man. That’s where we get the whole concept of pledging in our black Greek lettered organizational from. The new man then returned to the village and was given his own hut. He provided for his village. He was allowed to participate in governance. He was a man in every sense, and even his mother wasn’t allowed to question him. He didn’t know everything at that age and stage. He still had to utilize the counsel of his elders, but society recognized him as a man. Now, you contrast that with a 15-year-old boy of African descent growing up in the U.S. He’s forced to sit and be lectured at for eight hours straight, five days a week, lectured at about the same shit he been learning the last nine or ten years. We not even taking into account the bias and the structural racism in the U.S. education system. His nature is going to lead him to a different environment, one where he is stimulated, and one where he is able to test and prove his manhood. And where is that in most cases? Well, for many of us it’s the streets. That’s why you see so many cats leave school and turn to the streets right about that age. That’s the only place many young men can receive the stimulation their physical and mental maturity warrants.. At 15 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was at Morehouse, not in high school. At 15, Malcolm X was on the streets of Boston getting his education. Look at hip hop. Cats like Nas, Jay-Z, Tupac, by most measures these dudes are all considered geniuses, they also all abandoned our educational system about the same age. I know I am using anecdotal and historical evidence to prove my point, but I bet if you look at the data you’ll find that most black males who do drop out of high school do so at that very age, right about 15 or 16, right at the age where biologically and culturally, in African culture anyway, he was trained to become and eventually was treated as a man. In this culture, he is treated like anything but. Our nature and our pre-slave culture and tradition is completely incompatible with this Western education system. That’s why it fails so many of us. I read a book on this shit when I was a kid. Check out this cat named Dr. Jawanza Kunjufu. He lays a lot of this shit out in a book series he has called Countering the Conspiracy Against Black Boys.”
Lundy states that “The fanadu initiation is arguably the most important stage in the Balanta age progression because it represents manhood, adulthood, and the rights that are associated with this status. This ritual is some-times described as ‘opening the doors’ of maturity and wisdom in the Balanta community.” How could Cal and the millions of young black men like him, ever behave appropriately having never had the doors of maturity and wisdom opened for them?
Amid all the women, sex and typical hood experiences it recounts, 13 Bars of Iron is filled with lots of hidden doors that open one to a lot of knowledge and wisdom about the nature of black male and female relationships, the CIA’s involvement in Africa, Charles Taylor and recent events in Liberia, and even a cryptic reference to a son “who was a community organizer and an up and coming politician based in Chicago . . . . recently elected to serve in the Illinois State Legislature. When told to look out for that kid “cause he could fuck around and be President of the United States one day,” Cal responds, “Yeah, right. . . . an African nigga the President of the United States . . . .”
Read alongside The 26 Principles of the Great Belief of the Balanta Ancient Ancestors, 13 Bars of Iron can truly be considered a work of Balanta fiction. Which begs the question: how many other Balanta writers are there? We don’t know the answer to that now, but in the near future, genetic testing and genealogy research will allow the reclassification of all African Diaspora literature, and a new area of studies reading familiar works in relationship to their post-slavery specific ethnic survivals or departures.