Witches, Goddesses, and Angry Spirits: The Politics of Spiritual

72 Pages·2013·0.28 MB·English

by  Maha Marouan

Witches, Goddesses, and Angry Spirits
À ma mère,
qui a toujours été
une source d’inspiration
dans ma vie
Witches, Goddesses,
and Angry Spirits
The Politics of Spiritual Liberation in
African Diaspora Women’s Fiction
MAhA MArouAn
The OhiO STATe UniverSiTy PreSS / COlUmbUS
Copyright © 2013 by The Ohio State University.
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Marouan, Maha, 1975–
Witches, goddesses, and angry spirits : the politics of spiritual liberation in African diaspora
women’s fiction / Maha Marouan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-1219-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8142-1219-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-9320-1 (cd)
1. American fiction—African American authors—History and criticism. 2. American fiction—
Women authors—History and criticism. 3. African American women in literature. 4. African
diaspora in literature. 5. African American women authors. 6. Danticat, Edwidge, 1969– Breath,
eyes, memory. 7. Morrison, Toni. Paradise. 8. Condé, Maryse. Moi, Tituba, sorcière. I. Title.
PS374.N4M35 2013
813'.5409928708996—dc23
2012039927
Cover design by Janna Thompson-Chordas
Text design by Juliet Williams
Type set in Adobe Sabon and ITC Novarese
Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materi-
als. ANSI Z39.48–1992.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgments ix
Chapter 1 Introduction: A Theoretical and Thematic Framework 1
Chapter 2 In the Spirit of Erzulie: Vodou and the Reimagining of
Haitian Womanhood in Edwidge Danticat’s
Breath, Eyes, Memory 37
Chapter 3 “Thunder, Perfect Mind”: Candomblé, Gnosticism, and the
Utopian Impulse in Toni Morrison’s Paradise 71
Chapter 4 Conjuring History: The Meaning of Witchcraft in
Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem 103
Chapter 5 C onclusion: The Return of Witches, Goddesses, and
Angry Spirits 153
Bibliography 159
Index 167
Illustrations
Figure 1. T he front cover of the first French edition by Mercure de
France (1986) 132
Figure 2. T he front cover of the 1988 edition published by Mercure de
France in the Folio series 135
Figure 3. T he (alternative) front cover of the 1988 edition published by
Mercure de France in the Folio series 136
Figure 4. T he front cover of the English-language edition by
Ballantine Books (1992) 144
Figure 5. T he front cover of the English-language edition by
Caraf Books (1992) 146
vii
Acknowledgments
WhiLe the rough seed of this book started during my Ph.D. years at the
University of Nottingham, this project did not take shape until few years
later at the University of Alabama. I have been lucky to have had people
along the way who supported and inspired me, but most of all, offered me
the most precious gift a researcher could ask for, patience.
Of all those at the University of Nottingham, I would like to thank
my advisors Judith Newman and Sharon Monteith, who were there at the
beginning, as well as Susan Billingham and Marie Condé, who were gen-
erous with their comments and suggestions. I would also like to express
my appreciation to the School of American and Canadian Studies and the
International Office at The University of Nottingham, who provided me
with the Ph.D. Research Scholarship that made this project possible.
My appointment at the University of Alabama put me in touch with
a wonderful group of scholars. Of those, I am fully indebted to my friend
and colleague Stacy Morgan. The revisions of the manuscript would not
have been completed without his patience, insightfulness, and extensive
feedback on the various drafts of this work. The University of Alabama
Research Grant Committee, Capstone International Center, the Office
for Academic Affairs Williams’ Fund, and the Committee for the Col-
lege Academy for Research, Scholarship and Creative Activity awarded
me funding that allowed me to travel to various libraries and conferences
around the country and abroad to develop this research. I also want to
thank the Americanist Group at the University of Alabama for their valu-
able comments on my chapter examining Edwidge Danticat’s Breath,
Eyes, Memory. I was also lucky to have been offered a Visiting Scholarship
ix
x ~ Acknowledgments
at the Department of Modern Languages at Howard University in Summer
2008, which enabled me to complete important work on my second chap-
ter. For that, I owe thanks to James Davis.
At The Ohio State University Press, I would like to thank my anony-
mous readers for their valuable comments and suggestions that have helped
me sharpen this work, and my editor Sandy Crooms for her support and
patience.
Finally, a big thanks and gratitude to my wonderful friends Erica
Arthur, John Fagg, Celeste-Marie Bernier, Dave Deverick, Shilpa Ven-
katachalam, Ahmed Al Jarro, and Cornelius Carter, and to my wonderful
family—although I don’t get to see them as much as I would like to their
spirit is always with me: Amina Agmir, Mohammad Marouan, Houda,
Soufian and Hanae. Thank you for your love.
1
Introduction
A Theoretical and Thematic Framework
ThiS STuDy inquires into the construction of African diaspora female
spirituality as it features in representative fictions by three contemporary
writers of the African Americas: Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994) by the Hai-
tian American novelist Edwidge Danticat, Paradise (1998) by the Afri-
can American Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, and I, Tituba, Black Witch
of Salem (1992) by the Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé.1 All three
novels use African diaspora religious practices (Vodou, Candomblé, and
“witchcraft”) in order to create a space to refashion personal, cultural,
and historical identities for women of the African diaspora. Further, these
alternative religious frameworks provide the main avenues by which the
novelists empower their female protagonists and celebrate African dias-
pora womanhood in a broad sense, all while encouraging readers to main-
tain a healthy skepticism toward identity essentialisms.
While these works engage with multiple geographic locations of the
African Americas—Danticat (Haiti, United States), Morrison (United
1. I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, trans. Richard Philcox (Charlottesville: University
of Virginia Press, 1992) is the English translation of Maryse Condé’s novel Moi, Tituba, sor-
cière . . . noire de Salem (Paris: Gallimard, 1986). Chapter 4 will address both the French and the
English texts in detail.
1
2 ~ Chapter 1
States, Brazil), Condé (Barbados, United States)—these authors conjure
up symbolic diasporic connections beyond these geographic specificities.
Danticat, Morrison, and Condé stage transnational and transcultural nar-
ratives that undermine any attempt to define their texts as national or
regional literature. They evoke fictional worlds where history, fantasy, leg-
end, folklore, and myth merge to create a multilayered vision of African
diaspora identities.
This study reads Danticat’s, Morrison’s, and Condé’s novels as narra-
tives of revision. These authors stage radical interventions in the way they
unsettle, modify, and undercut traditional historical, religious, and cultural
discourses. They use oral histories, legend, and folklore to challenge tradi-
tional narratives of history and their claim to “truth” or “accuracy”; they
protest the exclusion of women from a male Judeo-Christian discourse;
and through a meditation on the symbol of the witch, they explore nar-
ratives of female violence and persecution. In their use of parody, irony,
and allusion, these authors maintain healthy skepticism toward notions
of diasporic authenticity. Their revisionist practices allow them to disturb
the European literary canon and insert their own marginalized voices in
its center. The structure of this study reflects the parameters within which
these authors’ works articulate their diasporic visions and relate to Afri-
canist beliefs as validated in Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory, reinvented
in Toni Morrison’s Paradise, and commodified/critiqued in Maryse Con-
dé’s I, Tituba. This introductory chapter elaborates these and similar com-
parative threads of discussion in order to contextualize the selected novels
of Danticat, Morrison, and Condé and in relation to the larger body of
African diaspora literature. This study also attempts to establish the the-
matic terrain these authors share with their peers while also making a case
for the qualities that make the three novels especially nuanced and signifi-
cant in their conceptualization.
When Christopher the Maroon in Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba asks Tit-
uba if she is a witch, Tituba replies: “Everyone gives that word a different
meaning. Everyone believes he can fashion a witch to his way of thinking
so that she will satisfy his ambitions, dreams, and desires” (146). Titu-
ba’s words provide an insight into this study’s central thread of inquiry.
Like Tituba, who questions the appropriation of her spirituality, each
author interrogates the way black female spirituality has been constructed
in Western cultural and historical narratives. Yet, while Tituba laments
the ways in which others attempt to “frame” her spirituality, she is also
aware that this unfortunate rendering of her spirituality provides her