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241 Notes Introduction 1. I generally use “voodoo” to refer to Hollywood/Western (mis)representations of Afro-creole religion. I use Vodou (uppercase) to refer to Haitian practice, and I use Voudou to refer to Louisiana practice. Also, I adhere to the various renderings of the authors whom I cite (Vaudou, Vodoun, voodoo, etc.). 2. National Geographic Society, Fast Facts Book (2009), 233. 3. I take the term hippikat from the West African Wolof language, signifying an “open-eyed” person, a seer. See my first book, Reading Africa into American Literature , for a hippikat perspective into a countercultural tradition of hipcats, hippies, and hip-hoppers (1–22). 4. I refer to Quentin Compson’s statement to his Harvard roommate Shreve, who has been usurping or co-creating Quentin’s Mississippi narrative in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, 289. My point is that Shreve becomes born there—in the narrative performance, at least well enough to co-narrate the story, though he is no more enlightened than is Quentin. I reference the famous “My mother is a fish” chapter from Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (84) to suggest an initiatory baptismal demand that all of Faulkner’s fluid Yoknapatawpha County texts place upon characters and readers. 5. W. Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, 289. 6. W. Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, 57. I treat Yoknapatawpha holistically, as a singular “space” of immersion. 7. Christophe, “Rainbow over Water,” 88. 8. Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, 332. Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in Haiti in 1936 and published the novel in 1937. Faulkner’s Haitipossessed Absalom, Absalom! appeared in 1936, shortly after the U.S. Marines were withdrawn. 9. Kristeva, The Powers of Horror, 2, 4. 10. See J. Smith, “Postcolonial, Black, and Nobody’s Margin: The U.S. South and New World Studies,” 144–61, 144; Paravisini-Gebert and Olmos, introduction to Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah, and the Caribbean, 1–12. 11. There is little in all this that was not predicated by the mosaic view and parallax effect essayed over a century ago by W. E. B. Du Bois in his articulation of double consciousness from folk figurations of second sight. The Souls of Black Folk (1903) indeed sought to have its readers born(e) there—wrapped in the veil’s amniotic sac— within a plantation Black Belt that was also a transposed Egypt and always anywhere south of the color line. 242Notes to Introduction 12. I use lowercase “creole” when speaking in general terms but uppercase “Creole” when speaking of a specific language or identity (Louisiana Creole). 13. Weaver, That the People Might Live, 38. 14. Dimock, Through Other Continents, 2–4. 15. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 257. 16. D. Brown, Santería Enthroned, 77. 17. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 7, 38. 18. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 36, 198, 200. 19. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 37. 20. Harris, “History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas,” in Selected Essays of Wilson Harris, 159, 152–66. For recent invocations of Harris’s limbo gateway , see Dimock, Through Other Continents, 162–63; and Russell, Legba’s Crossing, 7–10, 32. 21. Harris, “History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas,” 157. M. M. Bakhtin introduced the term “chronotope” in The Dialogic Imagination, defining it as “[a] unit of analysis for studying texts according to the ratio and nature of the temporal and spatial categories represented . . .” (426). 22. Harris, “History, Fable and Myth,” 158, 164. 23. Margaret Thompson Drewal, Yoruba Ritual, 24, xiii; Daniel, Dancing Wisdom , 253. 24. Julien, Travels with Mae, 2. I come to the idea of “restored behavior” via Roach’s presentation of it in Cities of the Dead, 3. 25. Julien, Travels with Mae, 2. 26. Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 2. Lafcadio Hearn offered early linguistic/culinary pointers in his Gombo Zhèbes (1885), which addressed “[t]he literature of ‘gombo’” (199) from a perspective attendant to the culinary and linguistic range of Creole Louisiana’s emblematic dish and its most profoundly vernacular style of speech. 27. Loichot, Orphan Narratives, 29. See also 12, 29–30. 28. See Allewaert, “Swamp Sublime.” 29. Quoted in Creel, “Gullah Attitudes toward Life and Death,” 79. 30. Cable, The Creoles of Louisiana, 316. 31. Nwankwo, Black Cosmopolitanism, 14. 32. Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World, 158. 33. Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World, 145, 149. 34. Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World, 142, 143. 35. Soyinka...

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