The Spirit and the Word: A Theory of Spirituality in Africana Literary Criticism (review)

In this project of privileging African-oriented critical paradigm, Georgene Bess Montgomery takes recourse in bricolage, reverting to Ifa divination, a spiritual ritual rooted in African cosmology mainly of the West African people. Instructive to this critical reading is the realization that literary texts are a function of multiple meanings. But more significant is the author's caution that the Caribbean and African American texts subjected to this paradigm can as well be analyzed using other critical approaches: Marxism, feminism, and various inflections of postcolonial theories. However, Montgomery argues that it is only through the use of African-aligned critical paradigms such as found in Ifa divination that one can experience the more enchanting meanings of these texts. Thus, for Montgomery the history of colonialism and displacement must only be confronted through a reconnection with spiritual elements that abound in much of African and its Diasporan writing. As a bricoleur, Montgomery envisages this exploration in terms of literary archaeology—where the primary essence of her project is to excavate the African presence, survivals, and continuities in Caribbean and African American works of fiction, a quest that in some way echoes Foucault's idea of subjugated knowledge.

The deployment of Ifa as a critical paradigm on Caribbean and African American texts, according to Montgomery, is not arbitrary: such texts lend themselves to its deployment through certain signatures, including use of ancestors, African traditions, religion beliefs, colors, numbers, conjures, signs, myths, legends, landscape, symbols, divination, initiation, ritual, and magic. Structurally, this book has five main chapters, excluding the introduction and conclusion. Chapter one is arguably the "soul" of this book, as it introduces and theorizes the Ifa as an emergent critical paradigm. It also rationalizes the privileging of a paradigm such as Ifa, arguing fervently that engaging with African Diasporic texts based on Western-oriented modes of spirituality hinders readers from sensing the African spirituality in such texts. The chapter, using Rosario Ferre's short story "The Youngest Doll" provides a template of how to deploy this critical paradigm. The subsequent four chapters each deploy the template variously to read Edouard Glissant's The Ripening; Merle Collin's Angel; Tina McElory Ansa's Baby of Family, and Arthur Flowers's Another Good Loving Blues. In reading these Caribbean and African American texts, Montgomery stresses that readings like these should be firmly grounded on Diaspora theory originating and informed by the "black tradition" of spirituality (3) and by the African perspective based on Braithwaite's categorization of the Diasporan literature in addition to some inflections of New Historicism.

What is profound about Montgomery's book is that through the application of the Ifa paradigm, alternative ways of reading Diasporic texts that might be more illuminating are provided outside the orbit of the more "orthodox" critical paradigms. To echo Merle Collin in the introduction to the book, Montgomery's serious appreciation of the African voice and the African sensibility in the literature of the African Diaspora is welcome and a much needed addition in corpus of critical theories. It is a significant continuum of works by African and African Diasporic scholars such as Wole Soyinka, Harry Garuba, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Edward Kamau Braithwaite.