African Spiritual Traditions in the Novels of Toni Morrison

5. In(her)iting the Divine: (Consola)tions, Sacred (Convent)ions, and Mediations of the Spiritual In-between in Paradise

5 In(her)iting the Divine (Consola)tions, Sacred (Convent)ions, and Mediations of the Spiritual In-between in Paradise We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space that makes it livable. —Lao Tzu Receiving, giving, giving, receiving, all that lives is twin. Who would cast the spell of death, let him separate the two. —Ayi Kwei Armah, Two Thousand Seasons Invocation Morrison structures her seventh novel, Paradise (1999), beyond the literary doppelganger or a re-fashioning of the oft-cited Duboisian concept of “Double Consciousness.”1 Instead, as I argue, she inscribes the negotiation of spiritual tensions in her use of spiritual amplification represented by the Yoruba Òrìsà known as Ibeji and the Dogon concept of twinning referred to as Nommo.2 The main goal of this chapter is to examine the distinguishing elements in this conceptual paradigm. Drawing upon the shared intersections of ecology and spiritual traditions, I explore the notion of spiritual balance, the re-construction/resurrection of the matriarch, and the nature of spiritual transcendence. A fundamental query guiding my eco-critical investigation is the nature of female spiritual traditions and the manner in which African women have redefined, restored, reclaimed, and recovered identity through a symbiotic relationship between themselves and the land. Additionally, I examine the ways in which women healers engage in African spiritual practices to engender those relationships to extend and regenerate life. 120 k Chapter 5 Advancing the novel’s theme of complementarity, Morrison relies on assemblages of dialectical unities in her consideration of the spiritual and material, male and female, heaven and earth, propriety and impropriety. Moreover, Morrison insists that in order to be whole, African people need to know their story through inquiry and contemplation iterated by Connie ’s comment to Mavis, “Scary things not always outside. Most scary things inside” (Paradise 39). To achieve a similar sense of this interiority, Morrison acquaints her readers with those spiritual principles that have endured despite disruptions along the way. Re-enacting beliefs and spiritual values over geographical space and time, African people have picked up new items correlating to those left behind and discarded excessive items. Moving beyond the pattern of bifurcation and “missing contents” attributed to modernism and postmodernism by Jean-Francois Lyotard, Africans have supplemented missing contents and recovered meanings in those spaces or breaches (244). The tensions created by missing information and other caesura along with dislocations, distortions, ambiguities, and unreliable information, challenges both characters and readers. From the beginning line, “They shoot the white girl first,” readers are lured into a world where nothing is what it seems either on the surface or at the core. Immediately, readers are engaged; they have to keep a keen eye open to be able to identify the “white girl” with limited clues. If they have read anything that Morrison has written, there is much work ahead; and they must actively participate to gain any meaning they hope to create.3 Exemplified in the next paragraph after the opening statement, Morrison ’s omniscient narrator gives misleading information in the form of a miscalculation revealing that there are nine members in the posse, “over twice the number of the women they are obliged to stampede or kill” (3). However, there are five women in the convent—the math is wrong. This aporia or logical disjunction will not be the last to occur. For example, the narrator recalls the “one hundred fifty-eight freedmen who left Louisiana and Mississippi” (13). But Deacon Morgan and his twin brother Steward, who are recognized as having “powerful memories” (13), who “between them they (could) remember the details of everything that ever happened —things they witnessed and things they have not,” and who “have never forgotten the message or the specifics of any story” (13), offer a different account. The number 158 is twice the number reported by Steward in the chapter titled “Seneca”—he reports the number of ancestors as being “seventy-nine” (95). This is not the last time the truth will reside in two In(her)iting Divine: (Consola)tions, Sacred (Convent)ions, Mediations in Paradise k 121 distinct domains. There will be many versions of the story regarding what happened to the Convent women and about how the “raid” went down. Perhaps, multiple examples of doubling prepare readers to rely not on the assigned value of words—but to look beyond words to the mythic layers , which...