Title: Women Who Know Things: African Epistemologies, Ecocriticism, and Female Spiritual Authority in the Novels of Toni Morrison
Abstract: In her novels, Toni Morrison mediates the distance between African belief systems and western hemispheric realities of Africans America. Repeatedly, Morrison illustrates how African women, soul workers, continue to employ symbolic, temporal and cultural codes reflective of African traditional religions and indigenous values. Sculpting spiritual landscapes emblematic of Yoruba, Kongo and various African spiritual systems, Morrison imbues her work with sacred features to simultaneously recover ancestral memory and engender the individual's and community's future endeavors. Asserting the circularity of and concentricity of African cosmologies, Morrison links her narratives with the sacred, symbolized by elements of nature to cleanse the community, re-integrate the African personality, and restore cohesion. Eco-critical ideas will be explored with a brief examination of Morrison's literary creation of spiritual spaces the wilderness that regard particular animals and plants as emblems of the divine ascribing particular powers to these objects ceremonial acts of propitiation and other ritual processes enacted by female spiritual officiants representing the Mama Nganga of the Kongo spiritual tradition and the Iyalorisa of the Yoruba belief system. Remember this: against all that destruction some yet remained among us unforgetful of origins, dreaming secret dreams, seeing secret visions, hearing secret voices ... --Ayi Kwei Armah From their earliest contact with African people, Europeans posited that the African's closeness to nature meant distance from God. To tame, domesticate, civilize, de-nature, and de-spirit Africans became the mission of American plantation owners and the process to affect control over an African population, which many southern states outnumbered their European-Americans enslavers. These attempts at religious acculturation also occurred the North as well. However, early written records attest to African people's maintenance of a spiritual connection with the land and the power they derived from these associations. In Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol, Painter comments on Truth's mode of worship and bond with nature, On an island a stream, she built herself a brush arbor, much like the outdoor shrines of black southerners, and worshipped God as though she were a West African river cult (Painter 7). Instructed by her mother to pray to the God who lives the sky under the sparkling vault of heaven, Truth's daily petitions in the noise of the waters is explicated by Bockie who notes Death and The Invisible Powers: The World of Kongo Belief that a person can pray at a river, a tree, or stones because of the all-pervading power of God. He recounts finding remnants of this approach to prayer among African Americans (Bockie 35). Sojourner Truth's spiritual aptitude is legendary and her testimony of not being able to read books juxtaposes her confidence divining or reading people. The supremacy which Truth values her intuition marks an early literary avowal of spiritual continuities. Key to this connection with her spiritual vocation is her symbolic relationship with the natural world. Evidence of this abiding reverence for the power of nature abounds literature representing its beauty and mythic potential to save African people from the traumatic terrain of American racial landscapes. By connecting Africa with America, African people have extended its geo-political boundaries, fortified the transported spiritual culture, and sustained the inter-spatial self and the collective self, which characterize African identity. Morrison reiterates these ideas her literary figurations. Discussing these ontological imperatives a 1988 Presence Africaine interview with Christiana Davis, Morrison insists: There's a great deal of obfuscation and distortion and erasure, so that the presence and the heartbeat of black people has been systematically annihilated many, many ways and the job of recovery is ours (Davis 142). …
Publication Year: 2007
Publication Date: 2007-03-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 5
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