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2 How Shall We Sing the Lord’s Song in a Strange Land? Constructing the Divine in Caribbean Contexts ALTHEA PRINCE Prelude The way they loved, softly and with passion. The way they worked, hard and with understanding that work would bring fruit, when the daylight broke, when the sunlight came. And they would lay the harvest out in the evening shade, as the fire dimmed and the heart stilled and the voices rested with the body, in the moonlight, behind the trees. As feet hurried to places of rest, a lone mongoose scurried across the path, its back unprotected from prying eyes. They saw it and it saw them, and they agreed to be silent, each about the other’s presence. Palm fronds whisper of things to come. Weeping willow mourning the past and future harrowing times. And the woman heard the whispers in the leaves and felt the brown fruit of the sapodilla sweet on her tongue, yet not sweet enough to wipe out the gall and the sting of the bitter-bush of life. Until the rain came. And the water washed over the whole experience. Rain falling, heralding the hurricane. Winds gusting, clearing the debris, whipping the trees around, changing their direction, forcing them to look out to sea, focus on the horizon, contemplate a distant course, as yet uncharted by a mariner’s compass. This path in life so new, not even the sun’s light yet brings it into view. And so they loved, softly and with passion. They worked hard and with understanding that when the daylight broke, when the sunlight came, the fruit would be a witness to their labor. In the evening shade, as the fire dimmed and the heart stilled itself to listen, they told the Story. The telling went on for many steps in the lineage. In the evening, in the dark, when the Old Ones spoke, the Story unfolded over all of Creation. And the words healed them. And the songs soothed them. And redemption came with the rain. THE ANTIGUAN PATCHWORK AS METHODOLOGY My methodology in writing this chapter is to work inward, like an Antiguan patchwork, starting at the outside (which is constructed as a sociological problematic ) and moving to the center, to the belly, to the place: the Caribbean. The problematic stated precisely is the following: the sociology of the Caribbean 26 Althea Prince clearly needs to include knowledge of the religious body of the Caribbean. For religion is a part of the whole of the people—a part of what comes out of their belly. In essence, it is a large part of a Caribbean topology of B-E-I-N-G, a part of the universe in which Caribbean people abide. I begin with a personal experience of “rememory,” a term coined by AfricanAmerican writer Toni Morrison (1987: 215). She uses it to signify sudden, tangible manifestations of something that lies deeper than the memory of events, reclaimed and given voice. First I present my experience of rememory, then the explanation and relevance to a discussion of Caribbean peoples’ construct of the Divine. I receive an Antiguan newspaper every week in the post in Toronto. The other day, I turned the page to a section titled “Hurricane Tips” and registered a rememory of stark terror. Suddenly, I was thrown back to my childhood, when each year, the entire island prepared for the hurricane season. I was catapulted, too, to the four years between 1983 and 1987, when I lived again in Antigua, having left eighteen years earlier. My terror as I read the “Disaster Preparedness” information, put out by the Disaster Preparedness Office, was palpable. I remembered activities that signaled the expectation of the worst possible eventualities of the island being hit by a hurricane. My reclamation, my rememory, made these things as real as if I were experiencing them in the present: the sound of boards being nailed to windows; the sight of people buying bread, dried goods, candles, kerosene oil; cleaning hurricane lamps, which had been ignored since the last hurricane; trimming the wicks, testing the efficacy of the flame; the filling of large clay jars with drinking water. The terror that these activities brought felt so real, I could reach out and touch it. The relevance of this experience I will use as the thread that will weave the patchwork together. There are two things to consider: (1) location, being inside of a place in your head, in...

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