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

Avey, however, is no longer this open. She has abandoned the soulful world of Tatem Island and has been fixed in "real world" struggles for upward mobility. So as Aunt Cuney travels through death and dream to lead her niece's spirit back to Ibo Landing, Cuney meets resistance from the now-grown woman whose gender, name, and soul Cuney announced months before birth, insisting "my gran' done sent her" (42). Praisesong calls Avey to recognition of being possessed by Avatara. In the terms of Haitian vodou, Avey's gros-bon-ange, "the metaphysical double of the physical being" (Deren 26), has as its mait-tete (master of the head) something of the transformed gros-bon-ange of old Avatara-calling Avey to become avatar of their shared loa. Cuney's role in this process of psychic reincarnation is ministerial as she reclaims soul-sources from the waters of the abyss and calls the backslider to "Come / Won't you Come . . . ?" (42).

But Avey fights furiously. After the dream's pitched battle between Cuney's (and old Avatara's) spiritually embodied modes of identity and Avey's materialist ones, Avey begins running from both Aunt Cuney and the now sickening cruise ship. Then, when she arrives at the dock in Grenada and is surrounded by out-islanders going on the annual regatta, their creole speech "called to mind the way people spoke in Tatem long ago" (67), and she feels "like someone in a bad dream who discovers that the street along which they are fleeing is not straight as they had believed, but circular . . . leading them all the while back to the place they were seeking to escape" (82-83).

Following Praisesong's opening section, "Runagate," the second section, "Sleeper's Wake," unfolds as a spiritual awakening and a dream-vision wake for Avey's dead husband and her own deadened self. True to the ritual transitions of Afro-creole wakes, music plays a strong role in steering Avey through the abyss between keening memories and emergent possibilities. Staying in a Grenada hotel while awaiting a flight home to New York the next day, Avey is confronted by music-suffused memories of her once tender marriage-two lives dispirited by relentless focus upon material success. She recalls how her husband Jay would shed his work-worn mask and ease back into his "real" self: "as if it was something apart from him, the sore spent body of a friend perhaps, he would lower his tall frame into the armchair, lean his head back, close his eyes, and let Coleman Hawkins, The Count, Lester Young (old Prez himself), The Duke . . . work their magic, their special mojo on him" (94). This "royal" music functions as a rite of possession, guarding the most sacred sources of self and community from forces of zombification. The "special mojo" of the soul music's healing transitions is very real. "The marvelous real," as Alejo Carpentier asserts, is not reduceable to techniques of the fantastic or mere magicianship; the marvelous "presupposes faith" since "[t]hose who do not believe in saints cannot cure themselves with the miracles of saints" (86).