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Hispanic American Historical Review 83.1 (2003) 210-211



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Healing Cultures: Art and Religion As Curative Practices in the Caribbean and Its Diaspora. Edited by Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2001. Photographs. Illustrations. Notes. xxi, 236 pp. Cloth, $45.00.

In Healing Cultures, the editors have collected a set of articles that address the interplay between the acts, discussion, and language of healing in syncretic Afro-Caribbean cultures, and the art those cultures have produced. "Culture" here means primarily religions, which the editors regard as "powerful repositories of inner strength and cultural affirmation" (p. xvii). Seeking to show "the beneficial aspects" of Afro-Caribbean syncretism "from within the communities in question" (p. xix), they have primarily chosen authors who speak from a direct, personal perspective. Mario A. Nuñez Molina argues, in his essay on healing and espiritismo in the Puerto Rican diaspora, that the experiential approach helps the researcher achieve overlooked insights and in "collecting, analyzing, and understanding data in a way that is more consonant with the culture being studied" (p. 123). This is a common methodological theme for many of the book's diverse contributors, who include psychologists, anthropologists, writers, and film critics. Certainly, this is true of Ester Rebecca Shapiro Rok's highly personal account of the uses of Santería ritual for psychological healing in the exile community, an essay that emphasizes cultural mixture and dislocation, or Opal Palmer Adisa's examination of her own work along with that Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, and Edna Brodber as examples of works of literature that heal black amnesia. Adisa argues that healing is possible only through confrontation with the brutal pain of the past. The need to turn the pain of Afro-Caribbeans' history of slavery, exile, and domination into healing is another major theme of the collection. Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz finds, as a unifying idea in Caribbean film, an interpretation of the Caribbean experience as a misstep or historical aberration. Healing in films like Heile Gerima's Sanfoka (1993), a story of Jamaican plantation slavery, comes as a result of the exorcism of the trauma of slavery through death and resurrection in the true home of Africa. In these films, magic, words, and stories serve to fix a broken Caribbean. The healing power of words and stories is a thread that runs through several other essays, including Fernández Olmos'sopening essay, "La botánic cultural: Ars Medica, Ars [End Page 210] Poetica" (pp. 1-15), which looks at how artistic and literary depictions of a culture's healing practices, in turn, provide healing for that culture. Karen Castelluci Cox examines healing in the novels of Julia Alvarez, where the words and stories of Vodou mysticism serve to heal the spiritual emptiness of Dominican-American women caught on the border of cultures.

The struggles of people who live on cultural borders—between U.S. and Caribbean culture, between Europe and Africa, and between modern and traditional lives—are the sources of pain that must be healed in these essays. Jerry Carlson notes that Caribbean filmmakers, unable to produce their art without the technology and the resources of the metropole, have struggled "within modernity to portray a struggle with modernity" (p. 150). But this is also true of the Vodou practitioners in Karen McCarthy Brown's essay, "Afro-Caribbean Healing: A Haitian Case Study" (pp. 43-68). Brown examines how Vodou adapts as it moves from rural areas to the urban environment, forced to grapple with the unraveling of large extended families whose members are drawn into a deeply impoverished version of the modern world. Their struggle and pains come from broken promises and failed obligations, either between humans and the loa, between individuals, or between individuals and the community. These failures are made more common by modern life. Healing is found through attention to these relationships, and the power to heal is found in knowledge and experience, expressed through words, stories, dance, and community ritual.

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