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Paul Carter Harrison Form and Transformation: Immanence of the Soul in the Performance Modes of Black Church and Black Music By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our lyres. For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? —Psalms 137:1–4 As Africans in the New World, black performing artists are faced with the daunting challenge of how to sing the liberating song of our ancestors in a hostile, alien land. Having been dislocated from the site of our ancestry, memory of the liberating song demands an inquiry into our spiritual origins. In most of the world’s cultures, the creation of all existence is believed to originate in the hidden activity of a Supreme Being. This hidden activity is often referred to as “the Word,” spoken or gesticulated. In the West African nation of Mali, the Dogon people’s version of the Word is the Nommo, which is understood to be the creative force that gives form to all things. The benefits of the Nommo, however, are received primarily through ritual: a speci fic, formalized activity that a people create in order to achieve a particular psychological , physical, or spiritual result for individuals and the community. It is through the specific ritual reenactment of the divine creation of the cosmos that participants in the ritual understand its human purpose: a cosmic bonding with the Creator, or Nommo force, which promotes spiritual enlightenment and corporeal empowerment . The practice of ritual, as Amiri Baraka observes in his essay “Bopera Theory,” is “the oldest root of performance” that leads to “the transformation of the human consciousness. “For the ritual to be effective, however, the participants must access the soul, the source of spiritual energy where ancestral memory is stored; and they must use the appropriate invocations to petition the ancestral memory. When the soul is touched, the ancestral spirit is awakened to empower the body/mind to greater spiritual fulfillment through enlightenment. Ancestral memory, then, is the essential foundation of the aesthetic objectives of African American inventions, both sacred and secular. The soul is our fundamental reality, the repository of the ancestral spirit that fuels the imaginings of the mind. It is the inner force of such ancestral spirit/memory—referred to by Robert Farris Thompson as a flash of the spirit—that also guides the imagination. It is thus necessary briefly to discuss this thing called soul in both African and Western perspectives. Africans in the New World are intimately familiar with the spiritual objectives of the Judeo-Christian theology that views mortals as once-perfect creations of God who became imperfect through original sin and must therefore seek atonement from God. Atonement allows the soul to find rest from its eternal struggle with good and evil. This creation story does not work for African cultures. Irrespective of the psychic and spiritual disjuncture of the Middle Passage, J. B. Danquah’s exegesis of the soul, gleaned from the ancient Akan sacred paradigm, is more appropriate to the sensibilities of African diasporic cultures. It is interesting to note, however, a correspondence between the Akan paradigm and the Platonic view of the soul, which recognized a need to close the distance between the corporeal and non-corporeal worlds. Plato views the soul as a nurturer of the divine musings of God that seeks to realize spiritual divinity by reuniting with the divine. As with the earlier, traditional Akan paradigm , the soul in its fullness is understood in the Platonic schema to be a harmony, not a duality, between corporeal experience and non-corporeal spirit. Plato recognized that the loss of such spiritual harmony is the result of the soul’s turning away from the divine source, thereby forgetting itself; hence the mortal’s experience of duality . Having lost “the recollection of those things which our soul once saw when following God,” the soul loses cognizance of its divinity. Despite this loss of harmony, the soul will be aroused when it encounters divine beauty, for this encounter will give it knowledge of its true and original nature. In J. B. Danquah’s description of the Akan sacred system, God (Onyame) is identi- fied as the Supreme Being, the Shining One, Absolute, Virtue and Righteousness. Emanating from the Shining One is...

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