Theorizing Scriptures: New Critical Orientations to a Cultural Phenomenon

15 Scriptures Beyond Script: Some African Diasporic Occasions

155 15 Scriptures Beyond Script Some African Diasporic Occasions Grey Gundaker Early birdcalls rode the mist as a small procession of three women and two men, slowly and silently wove through tall grasses and reeds to the edge of a tidal creek. The leader, a tall, bearded man, now slightly stooped with age, halted and gazed east toward the nearby sea. As the first pink of dawn tipped the grasses, he raised his arms and spread his fingers wide, praying in a language only one member of the group, an elderly woman, remembered from her youth. A tear coursed slowly down her cheek and the young man and woman came up beside her, placing supportive hands gently beneath her elbows to bear her up. She, too, gazed east, toward her home across the silvery water. The young couple’s eyes followed hers and their ears filled with the rhythms of prayer. Falling silent, the leader turned to the woman behind him, who held a shallow sea-grass basket lined with white cloth she had carefully washed and bleached in the sun. The contents of the basket were heavy, but she held it easily with arms toughened by years of labor in the rice fields. The leader took from the basket, one at a time, several objects shaped like duck eggs covered in script and signs and placed them gently into the water. As he did so, the group prayed aloud the words repeated on each egg, Allah, Allah, and asking that the Most merciful one who sees all to take the soul of their newly departed husband, father, and friend, away from this alien land and back to his home across the waters. The discourses that have long tied “scriptures”—a canonical corpus of sacred knowledge—to scripts—conventionally defined by linguists as graphic encoding of spoken language—obviously encompass much more than coding and decoding , or even interpretation and exegesis. As numerous critics of—and within—the “Western tradition” have pointed out, alphabetic script is one of the cornerstones of that tradition and premises about the nature of writing are, in effect, also premises about societies and individuals, their modernity (or lack thereof ), cognitive development (ditto), and capacity to contribute usefully to the intellectual and spiritual life of the planet.1 To cover such ground—and to provide grounds for colonizing so much more—“scriptures,” especially the Christian Bible, but also the Qur’an and the notion of “religions of the book”—have provided a physical, Grey Gundaker 156 portable packaging of Holy Writ, while alphabetic script has provided a portable, supposedly context-independent stepping-stone to “civilization.”2 Yet, for “scriptures” to have meaning, indeed for “scriptures” to have enduring significance for humanity at all, moments of scripturalizing, in Vincent Wimbush’s activating terminology, must inherently be intensely personal on some level, mobilizing spirit and social action alike. This is what makes “scriptures” compelling; it is also what makes scripturalizing political, even oppositionally political, especially when participants marginalized by dominant institutions invest “scriptures” with their own hopes. The story that opened this essay is a case in point. An ethnographic reconstruction , it is the most plausible account I can give thus far of practices involving a group of artifacts currently under investigation at the Institute for Historical Biology of the College of William & Mary: egg-shaped objects inscribed with Arabic letters incised in a white coating. Each egg is slightly different, and each is subdivided in ways consistent with the sacred numerology and talismanic traditions of West African Islam. Dr. John Bellome found the eggs in 2003 while clearing debris at the marshy edge of his property in coastal South Carolina. Located in a golf-course development on the grounds of former a rice plantation, Africans, most likely Muslims from the Senegambian region, were enslaved there during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries . The eggs join the very small corpus of surviving Arabic documents from this population, of which the Bilali or Ben Ali document in the Georgia State Library is one of the best known. The maker(s) of these eggs3 and the African Americans whose work is discussed in this essay build a texture of cues into objects and events that involve Figure 15.1 Arabic-inscribed eggs. Photograph by Grey Gundaker. Scriptures Beyond Script 157 scriptural components, including spatial cues, such as the divisions that frame Arabic script on these eggs. Such scripturalizing challenges the...