Faithful Vision: Treatments of the Sacred, Spiritual, and Supernatural in Twentieth-Century African American Fiction

5 Reshaping and Radicalizing Faith: The Diasporic Vision and Practice of Hoodoo

chapter 5 Reshaping and Radicalizing Faith The Diasporic Vision and Practice of Hoodoo jamaican-born novelist erna Brodber brings together the larger sacred , spiritual, and supernatural tradition of the African diaspora and shows its relationship to the African American in her novel Louisiana (1994). In its portrayal of hoodoo,Louisiana reveals an important part of the religious tradition indigenous to the African and diasporic past that Western culture and many African Americans have rejected. Brodber’s novel is similar to Gloria Naylor’sMama Day (1988) in its portrayal of a black cultural milieu in which hoodoo is a significant factor. The novel makes black women the spiritual center in a hoodoo cultural tradition reminiscent of the spiritual centering of women in the syncretic cultural tradition of Mama Day, and thus similarly decenters Western patriarchy. (Alice Walker’s The Color Purple [1982] does so in a somewhat different context.) Louisiana, however, goes further in portraying hoodoo as a religion of the African diaspora that can, in some cases, forge a link to the Bible but revise the Judeo-Christian tradition and create an alternative vision of the sacred, spiritual, and supernatural. The analysis of hoodoo as a religion of the black diaspora in Louisiana opens the way for a critique of Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), in which hoodoo is a religion that is even more oppositional to the Western tradition that proscribes it.1 Reed’s novel secularizes the voodoo religion, investing the sacred, spiritual , and supernatural in the human desires and actions of daily life, and the text vilifies God and Christianity instead of portraying Louisiana’s syncretism . Heaven, portrayed in Louisiana as a separate spiritual place that 156 nevertheless has a strong connection and clear relationship to the earth, does not exist in Mumbo Jumbo. In Reed’s novel, voodoo manifests itself almost totally in a mythicized, highly spiritualized temporal world. The novel’s reality is greatly defamiliarized by a voodoo mythic history and story of the past, and by hoodoo’s supernatural influence in present-day life, in which its spirits possess people constructively and destructively, use them to create art that expresses its essence, and generally inseminate the world with their greater than human power.2 However, the novel mainly focuses on the secular that is mythicized and spiritualized. Two kinds of spirituality exist, the kind that is good because it allows life to prosper and the kind that is evil because it oppresses and destroys. According to voodoo philosophy, everything always inscrutably evolves to the triumph of life; the only evil is the attempt to limit and obstruct the ways of infinite spirits that influence the expression and celebration of life in all of its diversity, this restriction being tantamount to death. The biblical and Judeo-Christian traditions are considered evil and deadly, just as voodoo is bad from the perspective of Christianity . In this context, Mumbo Jumbo does not engage the Bible directly to revise it to the same extent as Louisiana, but its narrative fully opposes the biblical story and the Judeo-Christian with its counterstructure and theme. In theoretical terms the narratives of both novels are structurally and thematically human artistic productions inspired by voodoo spirituality, meaning that we must judge them according to a hoodoo aesthetic that is encompassed in the general scope of postmodern textual theory. In Louisiana voodoo/hoodoo redefines Christianity to create an alternative religious cosmology; it is not just a powerful and feared aspect of the culture that is peripheral to Christianity and highly proscribed. Main character Ella Townsend is a hoodoo woman in late-1930s New Orleans whose belief and practice has evolved from the diasporic tradition.3 She is the priestess who is the primary oracle of the spirit of Vodun. (See the discussion of Vodun in chapter 4, note 14, and of voodoo in the analysis of Mama Day in chapter 4.) Characteristic of voodoo/hoodoo derivation and evolution in the diaspora, she syncretizes hoodoo and Christianity. Ella’s hoodoo worldview secularizes the heavenly and spiritual and spiritualizes the secular, and decenters God, foregrounds women, and focuses on the human. The emphasis on the human perspective is partly responsible for the proscription of hoodoo among Westernized black people acculturated to revere the sacred Judeo157 reshaping and radicalizing faith Christian God. However, reverence and positive human action constitute Ella’s whole life. Besides accepting herself as...