Notes toward a voodoo hermeneutics: Soul rhythms, marvelous transitions, and passages to the creole saints in praisesong for the widow

Southern Quarterly, Summer 2003 by Cartwright, Keith

To dare transition is the ultimate test of the human spirit. . . .

-Wole Soyinka

After having felt the undeniable spell of the lands of Haiti . . . after having heard the drums of the Petro and the Rada. . . . I found myself in daily contact with something that could be defined as the marvelous real. . . . Furthermore, I thought, the presence and vitality of this marvelous real was not the unique privilege of Haiti but the heritage of all of America, where we have not yet begun to establish an inventory of our cosmogonies.

-Alejo Carpentier

THE MOST DIFFICULT, most haunting transitions of modern human history followed in the wake of Columbus's mistaken discovery of the Indies. Born of severance from old worlds, the creole Caribbean was the first protagonist of the New World cauldron, the first forging of identity from violent crossings. While all in the New World underwent transformation, the Afro-creole world faced the most horrific forced transitions, crashing "through a deep abyss of a-spirituality and cosmic rejection" to emerge through "a titanic resolution of the will whose ritual summons, response, and expression is the strange alien sound to which we give the name of music" (Soyinka 145, 149). Through attentiveness to the ritual summons and enduring power of Afro-creole music, I hope to show how one particularly strong work bridging North America and the Caribbean, Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow (1983), follows numinous pathways (blazed by deities like Soyinka's Ogun) through realms of the ancestral, the living and unborn, and calls readers to ever-deepening transitions through New World boundaries.

In looking to the Caribbean, first site of dislocation of African, European, and Amer-Indian identities, we may discover that the collective memory and reinventions of Afro-creole music and religion serve par excellence as mediant channels for navigating the tragedies and transitions of our shared hemispheric experience. We may see, along with Paul Gilroy, how it is no real irony that Afro-Atlantic musics "produced out of the racialized slavery that made modern civilisation possible, now dominate its popular cultures" (80). Still, despite Melville Herskovits's studies showing "the myth of the Negro past" as cultural and historical tabula rasa to be a pernicious falsehood and "one of the principal supports of race prejudice in this country" (1), too few Americans have recognized the vigor and range of the Afro-creole foundational presence. Joseph Murphy calls the USA "a Creole country. . . . The denial of our Africanity is the great myth that Herskovits succeeds in exposing" (115). J.E. McTeer, who served as sheriff of Beaufort County, South Carolina for thirty-nine years while working as a root doctor and white colleague of the famous Dr. Buzzard, observed how "over the years of our country's growth, the white American has become a 'hybrid'" (96). Nothing, however, voices the nation's hybridity (and forces moving through repression of it) like the soul sounds Frederick Douglass heard as "a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God" (99) and which Du Bois called "the singular spiritual heritage of the nation" (178)-the heritage from which Paule Marshall's Praisesong emerges.

If we are to understand the range and power of Praisesong's music, we must pay more attention to the ways in which the word "creole" may represent us all. "Creole," with its ever-present association with race, tends to refer to an Africa-informed New World presence. Inca Garcilaso de la Vega wrote in 1612 that "children of Spaniards by Spanish women are called criollos or criollas, implying that they were born in the Indies. The name was invented by the Negroes . . . to distinguish those . . . born in Guinea from those born in the New World. . . . The Spanish have copied them by introducing this word to describe those born in the New World" (607). In The Creoles of Louisiana (1884) George W. Cable presented criollo as "a corrupt word made by the negroes, said to be a contraction of criadillo, diminutive of criado-one educated, instructed, or bred up, pp. of criar, lit. to create, also to nurse, instruct" (41). My own understanding of creolization, informed by linguistic models and responding to ideas of linguistic, cultural, and genetic "corruption" rehearsed in Cable's etymology, is supplemented by the vision of two Caribbean poets: Kamau Brathwaite who calls creolization "a cultural action-material, psychological, and spiritual" (296); and Edouard Glissant who writes that this cultural action coursing through Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha "has a name, Creolization, the unstoppable conjunction . . . that opens up torrents of unpredictable results . . . that terrifies those who refuse the very idea, if not the temptation, to mix, flow together, and share" (30). Identifying everything born, nursed, and re-shaped in the mix of New World contact situations, the word creole marks the hybrid spirit of true-true Americanness, a "poetics of becoming" (Glissant 226).