African Spiritual Traditions in the Novels of Toni Morrison

Introduction: There’s a Little Wheel a Turnin’ in My Heart: Cultural Concentricities and Enduring Identities

Introduction There’s a Little Wheel a Turnin’ in My Heart Cultural Concentricities and Enduring Identities Kidnapped by bandits and transplanted to North America, they became HooDoo men, maintaining the faith of the old religion. —Ishmael Reed, “19 Necromancers from Now” We have been believers believing in the black gods of an old land, believing in the secrets of the seeress and the magic of the charmers and the power of the devil’s evil ones. —Margaret Walker, “We Have Been Believers” Toni Morrison declares that the “forced transfer” of African people is the “defining event of the modern world” (“Home” 10). The arrival of captive Africans to North America, their enslavement, and their continued survival, represents a journey of remarkable resiliency. Besides enslaving African people, the deliberate mission of Europeans included efforts to destroy them by attempting to wipe out their traditions, substituting their languages, and desecrating their cultures. To reiterate, this experience of Africans in America has been a quintessential example of adaptation in the face of adversity.1 That they managed to continue on with any measure of psychic integrity is a tribute to the dynamic role that culture plays in the lives of people. A necessary element of life, culture is the medium through which humans exercise their humanity and express and affirm their view of reality. For members of the African diaspora, culture surpassed its role to provide self-definition and sustain the group ethos; it became a way to physically survive. As a site of cosmic connection, identity, meaning, and values were made and remade in order to resist. Through the tenacious practice of culture , Africans endured in America. This worldview bears witness to the strength of the survivors of one of the cruelest systems of human oppres- 2 k Introduction sion witnessed in human history. Because of this, African culture became stronger as the group faced cultural extinction from external forces. In “Theatre in African Traditional Cultures: Survival Patterns,” Wole Soyinka explains the nature of this fortification. He argues, “The commencement of resistance and self-liberation by the suppressed people is not infrequently linked with the survival strategies of key cultural patterns manifested through various art forms” (89). In The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition, Bernard Bell notes patterns of conditions and circumstances that produce the shared experience of culture, he says, “The network of understanding that defines black American culture and informs black American consciousness has evolved from the unique pattern of experiences of Africa, the trans-Atlantic middle passage, slavery, Southern plantation, tradition, emancipation, Reconstruction, Post Reconstruction, northern migration, urbanization, and racism have produced a residue of shared memories and frames of references for Black Americans” (5). In this study, I am not attempting to present African culture as a monolithic idea. Cheikh Anta Diop underscores this idea of unity across African cultures in the introduction to his authoritative work, The Cultural Unity of Black Africa. He writes, “I have tried to bring out the profound cultural unity still alive beneath the deceptive appearance of cultural heterogeneity” (7). As a response to challenges insisted on by the harsh environment, the brutal physical abuse by their captors, and the psychological disintegration produced by the chaos of the unfamiliar, Africans reached deep within themselves where the roots of culture abide. This protracted struggle and accompanying cultural resolve has allowed them to maintain the deep structure of their cultural distinctiveness. Moreover, dynamic cultural processes allowed enslaved Africans to establish familiar and intelligible patterns through maintaining and preserving their identities and renewing spiritual and ancestral forces. Many of the Africanisms were codified in the folkways of African people, especially the expression of spirituality. The intense need for the expression of spirituality reflected the continuity of beliefs transported from Africa. This spiritual aspiration was encoded in the folklore. In Puttin’ On Ole Massa Gilbert Osofsky affirms this adaptability , stating, “If one is to ever know about their visions, their quests, their mind, it is necessary to turn to the oral folktales that were collected in the nineteenth century and remain alive at this very moment” (45). Maintaining cultural continuity was difficult and fraught with many sacrifices and adaptations. It is well documented that the drum was outlawed, names were changed, and many traditional practices had to be adapted There’s a Little Wheel a Turnin’ in My Heart k 3 in such a way that their meaning was not recognizable by the enslavers...