African Spiritual Traditions in the Novels of Toni Morrison

Notes

Notes Preface: Dancing between Two Realms 1. In the preface of African Rhythm and African Sensibility, Chernoff explains that the fundamental aesthetic in Africa is participation, stating that “without participation there is no meaning.” Illustrating the importance of dance to music, he says, “When you ask a friend whether or not he ‘understands’ a certain type of music, he will say yes if he knows the dance that goes with it. The music of Africa invites us in the making of a community” (23). Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility, 23. 2. The Kongo cosmogram, dikenga dia Kongo, is represented in many ways in African American material and performance culture. See Tobin and Dobard, Hidden in Plain View. Also, see Gundaker, ed., Keep Your Head to the Sky. Thompson has documented the repeated influence in painting, quilt-making, yard decorations, funerary art, performance styles, and body gestures. The repetition of this structure is a variant of the ring shout, a Kongo sacred dance that African people retained in America. See Thompson, Flash of the Spirit. Also, see Thompson and Cornet, Four Moments of the Sun; and Thompson, Faces of the Gods. In its re-codified form as a popular dance, the Kongo cosmogram is performed as the “Electric Slide” (a testament to its Kongo origins of which a subgroup of people are referred to as Ba Kuba (the people of lightning). The dance consists of four 90-degree turns counterclockwise (360 degrees), which re-creates the dikenga dia Kongo and signs the remembrance of the matrix or spiritual structure of the circle representing the soul’s journey. Sterling Stuckey posits that the ring shout helped to consolidate African’s identity in North America. See Stuckey, Slave Culture, 12. It is significant that memorates were kept in musical and dance forms as symbolic modes of cosmic perception in the United States of America owing to the manner in which the particularly harsh conditions of American enslavement denied African people access to little other than their physical bodies. Since dance does not have a material artifact as the product, it allowed Africans to not be completely submerged by Euro-American concepts (Baraka, Blues People 16.) Dance is a major archival resource of African people and exists as “symbolic restatements of something sacred the history of which may still be remembered or may have been forgotten” (Idowu, Olodumare 115). See Fabre, “The Slave Ship Dance” in Black Imagination and the Middle Passage. According to Fabre, in dance performances Africans expressed coded kinships and loyalties, references to the spirit world and claims of African identity (40). Through the creation of sacred space, Africans re-presented belief systems using the body to inscribe the cultural worlds east and west of the Atlantic. Like the dikenga dia Kongo, the Yoruba worldview is also described as a circle with intersecting lines. The circle with a cross has a representation in Yoruba spiritual culture as orita meta or the crossroads, the intersection between the cosmic realms. As such, merindilogun divinations performed with sixteen cowrie shells begin with the inscription of this sacred sign to open the channels to pass information between the realms. 3. In this study I employ the term spirituality as a multivalent term that includes, but is not limited to, notions of philosophy, religion, belief systems, ritual practices, kinship, and community formation representative of a clustering of African identities . Moreover, in my application of the term I am creating a spiritual inquiry across distinct cultures and disciplines within the historical, cultural, and spiritual context of the African diaspora. Undergirding this approach is a theoretical alliance with the ideas that Olupona expresses in the foreword to African Spirituality. I concur with Olupona, who asserts that “African people continue to express an essential element in the formation and sustenance of modern cultures in various parts of the globe consistent with African meaning in the modern, post-colonial world” (xv). His edited volume explores how Africans in the diaspora and on the African continent have maintained the possibilities of making and deriving meaning relative to the spiritual world. Introduction: There’s a Little Wheel a Turnin’ in My Heart: Cultural Concentricities and Enduring Identities 1. For the purpose of this study I am defining African peoples as a confederation of various nations of people captured and brought to the western hemisphere. Additionally, I am using the term African in its broadest sense to include all people of African descent, regardless of national origin. I am not employing the...