Lovelace, on the other hand, especially in Salt (1996), reiterates the African ethos in the New World and advances it beyond the metaphorical to an aesthetic construct defined as bacchanal aesthetics. Bacchanal aesthetics, at a basic level, is THE ARTISTIC practice that appropriates and radicalises the underground cultural practices fashioned by ordinary New World Africans to deal with the realities of enslavement, colonisation, deracination and exploitation. As process, bacchanal aesthetics is the aesthetics of the crossroads or the crucible of history and cultures. The greater the number of roads intersecting at a crossroads, the more vibrant (for those who understand the layout) or confusing (for strangers) it becomes. Bacchanal aesthetics is, therefore, the aesthetics of the crossroads as the meeting point of possibilities: the old and the new; official and unofficial interpretations; the cardinal points of meanings and/or the world; the secular and the mundane; and so on. Lovelace’s practice of bacchanal aesthetics recognises the fluidity and instability inherent in all cultures as works-in-progress and welcomes such fluidity and instability as rationales for the artist’s freedom to experiment in order to advance the frontiers of style and vision. It is Lovelace’s embrace of elements of bacchanal aesthetics, for example, which drives the Carnival-inspired experiments in novels in which the narrators sing or use calypsoes as meta-narrative threads, so much so that I have described these novels elsewhere as novelypsoes.
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