Caribbean Literature: A Theological Conversation “I am about to do a new thing…do you not perceive it?” [Isaiah 43:19 NRSV] “I had no nation now, but the imagination.” [Derek Walcott, The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979), p.8] “But we have this treasure in clay jars…” [2 Corinthians 4:7 NRSV] “I strove to articulate that hollowness into the „withinness‟ of the Word…” [Wilson Harris, The Infinite Rehearsal (1987), p.51] “Every scribe…..brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old [Matthew 13:52 NRSV] “I have lost my tongue/from the root of the old one/a new one has sprung.” [Grace Nichols, The Heinemann Book of Poetry (1992), p.174.
“See, I am making all things new…Write this….” [Revelation 21:5 NSRV] “So on this ground/write…on this ground/on this broken ground.” [Edward Brathwaithe, The Arrivants, (1973), pp.265-266]
The Presenting Issue: Religiosity as a Repeating Theme A cursory perusal of the works of Caribbean novelists, poets, and artists underscore the importance of faith, religiosity, religion(s) and belief(s). Artists, poets and composers are often up to exposing the holy in the common and provide a way for human beings to experience, question and praise it. Caribbean prose and poetry, as Gordon Collier has noted, always had “a spiritual and spirited edge to it; a relaxed insistence on divine immanence within the tangible, natural world is never far away.”1 Was this in the mind of Antonio Benítez-Rojo when he wrote: “I study the Caribbean as a turbulent system, beneath whose disorder (the impossibility of Caribbeanness) there are regularities that are repeated (the possibility of Caribbeanness)?”2 Is it possible to consider Caribbean religiosity, practice of faith and spirituality as a „repeated regularity‟ that runs throughout all aspects of Caribbean life? It is my view, that this specific theme is what Gordon Collier is hinting at. Silvio Torres-Saillant agrees.3 Noting the “omnipresence of religion” (generally perceived as the supernatural) as a theme of „repeated regularity‟ running through Caribbean literature he contends that
A list of all the literary works from the archipelago that touch on religious matters, including those that do so in a negative way by denying or challenging the validity of the sacred, would include the bulk of Caribbean literary works.4
To neglect religiosity as „repeated regularity‟ would impoverish our discourse. There is the need to come to grips with “the profound religious sensibility” of Caribbean writers and “the relationship between subversion and the sacred”.5
Presently, there is much interest in the variety of Caribbean (popular) religions, how these have grown and the accommodation/syncretism that resulted from the meeting of the established religion and that of former slaves and indentured labourers.6 There is a need to articulate the connection between Caribbean literature, these discourses, an evolving Caribbean theology and the recent articulations of Black God-talk (theology). As a theologian, what strikes me, is that in theorizing on Caribbean themes and/or studies there is a tendency to gloss over the fundamental reality and importance of faith/Caribbean spirituality and its impact on Caribbean peoples and their psyches. Is it possible to theorize on Caribbean experiences and themes without understanding and analysing this? As Robert Beckford puts it in the Black-British context: Spirituality is a major force in contemporary Black British life…One cannot do comprehensive cultural or political work on Black existence and ignore the importance of Black religion and spirituality. 7
A similar point is made by Althea Prince who observes that “the sociology of the Caribbean clearly needs to include knowledge of the religious body of the Caribbean. For religion is part of the whole of the people - a part of what comes out of their belly. In essence, it is a large part of a Caribbean topology of B-E-I-N-G, a part of the universe in which Caribbean people abide.”8
When, however, the fact of Caribbean religious influence and spirituality has been recognized, the theorizing is usually done within historical, sociological and anthropological frameworks9 and more than likely through the optic of a mid 19th century neo-European Christianity. At the same time, Caribbean theologians at „home‟
(Caribbean) and in the Diaspora are yet to engage with Caribbean literature. Voices from Caribbean „God-talkers‟ such as Mulrain10, Bodhoo11, Taylor12, Sankeralli13, Erskine14, Williams15 and Murrell, Spencer and Mcfarlane16 who have engaged with Caribbean religions from a theological (and religious) perspective are yet to engage theologically with Caribbean literature. Two notable exceptions are Patrick Taylor 17 and Darren Middleton (not from the Caribbean). The latter‟s essay entitled “Riddim Wise and Scripture Smart: Interview and Interpretation with Ras Benjamin Zephaniah” is good example of the discourse between theology and literature.18
If Caribbean theologians seem to fall into the habit of designed unawareness when it comes to theological themes in Caribbean literature, one can also posit that there seems to be a degree of reservation in Caribbean literary discourse in wanting to engage with the significance of Caribbean religiosity (faith and spirituality) as important dimensions of Caribbean literature.19 Melvin B. Rahming highlights this point in his plea for literary critics to engage with “the spiritual terrain of creative texts”20 especially from Caribbean and African writers. He notes: “With imaginative splendour, these novels hold up a mirror to human and cosmic spirit and to the spectrum of possibilities that emerges from human and cosmic interaction; they testify to the authors‟ fecund awareness of cosmic interrelatedness, the unbound locus of spiritual activity. Consequently, they confound the attempts of critics to fit them into Western critical constructs, none of which places spiritual considerations at the discursive center.”21
While I agree with Rahming, he misses the literary voices that stand out. I presume this is because he writes from a dominant and hegemonic North American context. For, there are exceptions evident in the significant contributions of Gordon Rohlehr, Jennifer Rahim and Gordon Collier. In terms of the early discussion on articulating a Caribbean theology (1970‟s), Rohlehr‟s name comes up as a voice crying in the wilderness for theologians to note the role of the “spiritual” in the Caribbean psyche and as this is
reflected in Caribbean literature.22 Rahim‟s essay (1995), “Patterns of Psalmology in Lovelace‟s The Wine of Astonishment”23 is one of those rare pieces in which the kind of interdisciplinary conversation I am interested in happens. Here she engages with Walter Brueggemann, a contemporary Biblical scholar from North America in the context of her redaing of The Wine of Astonishment. Gordon Collier‟s essay (1996) “At the Gates of cultures of the New World”24 is the key contribution to the much needed conversation between theology and Caribbean literature.25 Also of significance is the volume Mapping the Sacred (2001),26 especially the reflections on aspects of Caribbean literature. I would also want to include the input of Paula Burnett, in particular her chapter on Walcott‟s employment of myth in Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics (2000).27The fact that these are all reflections from the perspective of literary critics underscores the necessity of the kind of conversation I am interested in. I would like to challenge Caribbean theologians to reach out and receive the offerings of Caribbean literature - to glue their ears onto the spaces of the Caribbean literary canvas in order to discern raw materials for Caribbean theological articulation. At the same time, I wish to impress on my colleagues in Caribbean studies (literary and others), the importance of such an ongoing dialogue which will be true to the „whole‟ Caribbean psyche. Together, we must be vigilant to the dangers of the “ghettoisation” of the Caribbean experience into neat isolated categories.
Purpose of the Undertaking In making a case for theological conversation with Caribbean literature, this paper merely offers fragments of such a conversation. Conversation or dialogue is the operative metaphor here. My fundamental point is that religious references (subtle and overt) in Caribbean literature are not incidental. They find a deep place in the Caribbean psyche and soul. It ought to take a central place in any theorizing on the Caribbean. In
engaging with Caribbean fiction from a theological entry point, I am interested in asking questions such as: What is the role of faith in Caribbean literature? Does theology shape cultural identity or does cultural identity shape our God-talk? What is the role of the bible, or any religious texts, in the works and imaginations of Caribbean writers? In what ways do authors and their fiction contribute to the theological debates regarding Caribbean identity and community? What insights can Caribbean literature provide to help theologians counter totalising proclivities, over-dependence in exactitudes and dead/deadly dogmas? How does Caribbean literature challenge the way in which Caribbean Christian theology has been written, read, understood and articulated? How can Caribbean writers, poets and artists stir the theological imagination towards releasing some of the biblical texts and theological notions from the shackles of ideological and cultural captivity in order to become relevant in the Caribbean context(s)?
Clarifying Terms and Locating Myself Given my approach and objective(s), it is important that I define some of the terms I am using or at least explain how I am employing these. I am using Caribbean religiosity to embrace Caribbean people‟s faith and faithfulness which includes their spirituality. Hence, religiosity, faith and spirituality are used interchangeably. It is not only Christian. By spirituality I mean the totality of one‟s interrelated existence as embodied in ways of life, modes of thinking and the diverse expressions of behaviour and attitudes toward the mystery that surrounds one‟s immediate context and world.28 It is about the capacity for self-transcendence. The term “Black” is used as a political term or construct to describe the collective racial identity of Caribbean people. This is used specifically in the case of articulating a theological perspective different from that of the western theology. By Caribbean theology I mean Caribbean „God-talk‟. My understanding of
theology is that it is an encounter of theos (God), through the word revealed in scripture (especially through word enfleshed in Jesus) and logos - words of a people and the harsh realities in which they live and their anguished cries. The departure point here is God-talk that is expressed in and through the reality of Black experiences and struggles.29 Theology or God-talk is a work of faith inseparable from the lived experiences of everyday life and ought to point towards liberating transformation. The notion of „God-talkâ€&#x; within this framework is laced with multiple meanings. It can mean that God talks or that we can dare to talk about God, even discern the tongue of God or that God-talk is inseparable from human-talk. The most humbling implication of this is the provisional and tentative nature of theology, lest one misrepresents the Divine.
My entry point into this conversation is that of a Christian theologian whose heritage constitutes both Muslim and Hindu influences.30 As one whose life has been shaped in the Caribbean, my theology, theologising and hermeneutics reflect its Caribbean heritage - especially its rainbow nature embracing a diversity of peoples, religions, cultures and the ongoing dialogue and interaction in this context. This is one of the reasons why I find it difficult to theologise with a view. My proclivity is to do theology from a multiplicity of views in creative and dynamic dialogue and tension. This is important to note as I have no interest in defending or articulating fossilized/monolithic theological notions. God talk (theology) for me is done within the rich world of Caribbean diversity, contradictions, ambivalence and the exciting possibilities and gateways this offers.
Caribbean Literature, the Imagination and Theology The divine, whatever form, shape and name, is always immanent in the whole of Caribbean life – even in all the numerous contradictions of life. Caribbean religiosity and religious expressions/ideas are readily manifested as a collective experience of
Caribbean peoples. Contrary to what experts and Christian theologians would have us believe boundaries are amorphous and Caribbean people‟s religiosity is characterised by a natural and healthy dialogue and fusion of cultures and religions. „In spite of‟, the Divine pops up with a nagging regularity and in various forms, shapes and images. God, at least in the Caribbean, does not suffer from a chronic housing problem. Yet, God in much of Christian theology in the Caribbean (past and present) is still to be „deenveloped‟ (to be released) and embodied in Caribbean flavour and tempo. Austin Clarke problemtizes the issue very graphically by having the narrator in “Easter Carol” reflect on her mother‟s experience in two different churches. “There she could testify how God helped her when she didn‟t know where the hell she could get six cents from to buy flour and lard and oil to make bakes for her children. There she could clap her hands and stamp her feet till the floor boards creaked with emotion, and jump up in the air and praise God and for all that feel God was listening. But in the Church of England she was regimented to sit-and-stand exercise of dull, religious drilling. And she always complained to Lavignia that she did not understand one word of what the parson was talking about. He used words that simple, common people could not understand. And, never, never „have I seen anybody stand up in the Church of England and say Amen, Halleluiah to God‟. It was such a strange Church to her.” 31
In the Caribbean context, one could hardly disagree that in the religious imagination of many Christians it is not only the established Churches and their theologies that seem strange. God is also strange, “a foreigner, a kind of white expatriate who is not God” of our own history, but an outsider, standing over and against” Caribbean peoples.32
Using the insights of liberation theologies (of all shades and contexts), I wish to firstly contend (as my working definition of theology implies) that theology is dead when divorced from real life, practices and people‟s stories, myths and histories.33 Authentic theology plumbs the depths of a people‟s life and living. God-talk is integral to the narratives that shape our lives. It must witness to God‟s anguish in people‟s anguish, celebrate God‟s hope in the hopes of a people, point to God‟s anger in people‟s anger and connect God‟s laughter with people‟s laughter. Our problem is that much of the
inherited biblical theology and hermeneutics bought into the western Bultmanian emphasis on „de-mythologizing‟ - getting rid of all the myths to get behind the real Jesus and the authentic gospel. A product of his European culture, Rudolph Bultmann argued that because the cosmology of the New Testament is largely mythical there is the need for it to be translated for the purpose of kerygma. Theology‟s task is to peel off the kerygma from its mythical embodiment - to demythologize it. Effectively, what resulted was the re-clothing with European garments, modern myths. This is the legacy that much of Caribbean theology inherited and has largely internalised.34 That must now give way to Caribbean myth-making and the phenomenon of story not only be returned to as a culturally viable mode of communication, but also a viable theological method or form. We should also consider and accept the category of story as the counter-point for theologising with a Caribbean flavour and tempo. Here the writings if Brathwaithe, Cliff, Conde Harris, Lovelace, Senior and Walcott, to name a few, are of theological importance.
My second contention is that the encounter between theos and logos also involves the attempt to analyse, criticise, deconstruct/reconstruct and de-code/re-code our inherited theological notions. In the 1980‟s, the Taiwanese theologian Choan S. Song called for a “third-eye theology” to see beyond the dead theology of “two-dimensionality”.35This encounter of re-orientation, this doing of theology with a „third eye‟ involves the continuing activity of the human imagination.36 Caribbean writers, poets and artists have been most perceptive in unearthing and accounting our people‟s agony/anguish, history, anger, joy, pain, laughter and the contradictions of life and living. They are the ones who perceive the world with the profound working of the imagination and who are ideally placed to enable us to see beyond the façade and the facile in order to catch glimpses of the deep religious meaning of the interior of life and the world.37 As Song
puts it: “In art and in literature this love of the God-[hu]man at work in a community is often depicted with theological profundity and sensitivity.” 38 The hiatus between the Caribbean people‟s spirituality and their perception of the Divine and that of Caribbean Christian theology can be located in the language used to represent the Divine. Metaphors of God “as King, Ruler, Lord, Master and Governor, and the concepts that accompany them of God as absolute, complete, transcendent and omnipotent”,39 allow no room for reciprocity, a mutual relationship and partnership, not to mention the association they have with notions of empire and colonial power. For one of the key features of the colonial agenda is control over language. 40 Hence, biblical scholars like Musa Dube and R.S. Sugirthrajah41 are closely scrutinizing the various forms of representations in the texts and the different ways that these are implicated in the imperial agenda and consequent oppression of the „subaltern‟. For representations are never exact or value free. As Edward Said has demonstrated in Orientalism (1978), representations as constructed images are not harmless likeness. They convey messages that influence the ways the Orient and its natives are perceived. They need to be interrogated for their ideological content.42
The crucial question for Caribbean God-Talk relates to finding new metaphors and symbols through which the Divine can be conceived. As I have noted in 1991: “It is imperative that the language used to express the relationship between God and the created order, especially in the Caribbean, be radically revised, a revision which must begin at the level of the imagination.” 43
One of the Caribbean writers who emphasizes the importance of the imagination and the need for imaginative daring is Wilson Harris. Harris‟ concern is the state of neglect to which the imagination has been relegated. Hence, he speaks of the “illiteracy of the imagination”.44 Harris, as Michael Gilkes has observed, is interested “with the way in
which the creative imagination is able to re-discover the deep, cross-cultural roots of all established traditions”.45 Writing in The Womb of Space (1983), Harris gives us an insight into the significance of the role of the imagination for Caribbean writers. “The paradox of cultural heterogeneity, or cross-cultural capacity, lies in the evolutionary thrust it restores to orders of the imagination, the ceaseless dialogue it inserts between hardened conventions and eclipsed or half-eclipsed otherness, within an intuitive self that moves endlessly into flexible patterns, arcs or bridges of community”. 46
Likewise, Derek Walcott sees art and poetics “as helping the world to imagine not only its heterogeneity but its potential difference”.47 To dismantle “the obsessional codes which threaten society” calls for the engagement of “the creative imagination”, otherwise
history
becomes
a
repeated
spiral
of
exploiter/exploited
and
oppressor/oppressed.48
The lack of imagination or imaginative daring that Harris speaks of is also endemic among theologians. This prompted Brueggemann to note that “in our time we can notice the absence of poetic imagination in some of the religious hucksters who promise certitude by flattening out all the rich metaphors.”49 While resources for doing theology are not lacking, our dilemma is located in our suspicion of the imagination. Having inherited Christianity with all its Euro-centric baggage, I suggest that we have become neatly locked into a largely Protestant theological mindset that has relegated the act of the imagination to the realm of „hocus-pocus‟ which is viewed with much suspicion. We have lost the sense of magic, mystery and awe. These have had to go underground and through limbo gateways are embodied in much of popular Caribbean religiosity. While Black theological discourses (and contextual theologies) emphasise experience, there is still much work to be done in the area of „imagination‟. We need to radically revise and find new stories to break this hold. I see a joint venture with our writers, poets, dramatists and artists. To decode and re-read the number of resources available,
to find new metaphors to represent the divine and the world that would counter a “uniform kind of narrative, a uniform kind of frame”,50 it is imperative that the imagination be deepened and the power of theological imaging be strengthened.51
The imagination helps us to plumb deep into existence and open gateways into reality that are usually closed to us.52 And having pushed us as far out as we are meant to extend is where reality begins.53 In terms of the biblical take on the importance of the imagination, the narratives of the Creation in Genesis underscore how God images the human person out of God‟s own self. By this act God imparts to humankind the ability to image all creation in relation to God. Thus, with this gift of imaging the poet, writer, painter and theologian (among others) perceive the Divine, the universe, human beings and their relationships and all the ambiguities and contradictions that we live with. As Aritha van Herk writes: “I suspect that if there is any way for us to measure the boundless possibilities of spirituality and faith, the reach of the imagination is perhaps the closest we can come.”54
I want to press the argument that both theology and literature are essentially products of imaginative constructive activity. It is my contention that both attempt to depict our human existence and its problems in terms that will enable human beings to understand them more profoundly, to appropriate them more adequately and to discern their true character and significance more seriously. Further, it is my view that Caribbean literature partially assists in God‟s oikonomia (economy) by helping people understand the whole community, by reminding the people of their social responsibility and by awakening them to the requirements of justice.
Caribbean literature offers a ripe space for nurturing a counter-imagination in a context of what Wilson Harris calls “the illiteracy of the imagination”. Imagining differently
anchors Caribbean folks struggle to be self-defining – to own their heritage and experiences as they dream a present and a future that is grounded on hope. No wonder our writers make good use of memory or the act of recalling in their effort in creating a new possibility or reality. In providing memories, narratives, visions, images and metaphors that are not easily domesticated, Caribbean literature can enable us to imagine worlds where ideas and stories are re-staged/rehearsed and dialogue and crossfertilise across cultural boundaries. Hence, they do offer Caribbean theologians more useful, dynamic and cathartic metaphors than those we are accustomed to. These linger in the hearing and the talking and offer possibilities for imagining a „new heaven and a new earth‟, in other words, the „more‟ of a world transformed.
One scholar, who gives theological/biblical content to the imagination, is Brueggemann.55 He contends that the inability to discern the imaginative power of the biblical texts to transform and evoke new possibilities may be located in our proclivity for “the firm” and “settled truth” in the “technical certitude of this age”. Thus, we miss the envisioned alternative “of the daring of poetic speech to move beyond settled reality” and “walk to the edges of alternatives”56 as manifested in the prophetic imagination. The poets of such an imagination “not only discerned the new actions of God….but they wrought the new actions of God by the power of their imagination, their tongues, their words. New poetic imagination evoked new realities in the community.”57
The process of imagining and tapping into the imagination of God is akin to the midrash58 hermeneutic process. In this process the biblical text is pushed beyond limits and outside the boundaries, extended or elaborated, turned upside down and inside out as „truth‟ gets broken, perverted and re-arranged. What is not said in the text becomes just as significant as what is said. In the process, meanings and insights never imagined
and perceived before become evident. Like the midrash, I contend much of Caribbean literature to be already midrashic, enabling us to liberate and release the imagination and give God and the Spirit more space to move freely within the texts at the edges/ boundaries59, and between the text and the context, and the reading community and its context. My view is that Caribbean theology and literature can unearth the experiences of the peoples of the Caribbean, giving them structure and clarity, and letting the power of the imagination find new metaphors to make them accessible to people and keep them alive. Like calypso, it will reflect the pulse beat of our people: it must lift and resurface the experiences of Caribbean peoples. This is a task for the whole community.
A related and important issue is the relationship between Caribbean stories and theology. I contend that Caribbean stories are theological. God created human beings because God loves stories. God exists because humans are story/mythmakers. In our storied world, the dwelling place of our faith is enlarged and theological space expanded. Our writers, many of whom are nurtured within the breadth of Caribbean religiosity (mainly Christianity), use their imaginations to plumb the depths of Caribbean experiences and the feelings of Caribbean peoples and their life‟s stories. What can be more theological than people‟s life stories? A cursory glance through the pages of religious texts will reinforce this point. The biblical narratives using images and metaphors common to the people, subjectively tell stories of how people perceived God to be acting in their lives and events related to them. The bible is the story book par excellence for Christians. If faith is always been about a story then we need to pay greater attention to our people‟s stories and to reflect theologically upon them. For, narrative is not a choice we make when it comes time to explore „truth‟. It is the way we encounter truth(s): “not in crisp propositions, but in messy tales of encounters between people and people, between people and creation, between people and God[s].”60
It is in this context that I am suggesting that theology needs to be imaged and not merely conceptualised. It is the power of the imagination that makes doing theology finding new language, forms of expression and metaphors, revising stories, unearthing the buried characters – an ongoing process of deconstructing and re-constructing that will give our God-talk its authenticity. Our writers and poets have been using the imagination to a similar end. Through the sacred space of their imaginations they filter the triumphs and horrors. It is time for an inter-disciplinary discourse.
It would be unfair, however, to expect Caribbean/Black literature to preach the gospel since that is not its function. Caribbean literature ought not to be evaluated on the basis of any religious texts. Insofar as human beings are confident of God‟s love for them, they do not need the sermon. But insofar as we humans are inclined to make a name for ourselves and build homogenous towers of Babel at the expense of the “Other”, to become locked into uniformed narratives and functions and bow down to the dominant culture then we need the sermon to proclaim the counter-cultural way of the Divine and we can be grateful for any help that writers can provide in understanding ourselves, the world, human values and ultimately, the Divine. Caribbean theologians, like our writers, poets and artists are called not to preach and give advice; our vocation is to stir, to evoke and offer an alternative consciousness, to surprise and to imagine a different world through “porous”61 (not fixed) language. For people and communities are transformed not by preaching about the moral/ethical high ground but by a metanoia of the imagination.62 In this regard, I am very sympathetic to the insight of van Herk who observes: “Perhaps we have to be willing to radically alter our imagining of what or who the Deity or Deities is. Perhaps we have to alter our definition of faith and spirituality. Perhaps we have to re-incorporate the natural world that has been so truncated, so removed from contact
with the spiritual world. Perhaps we have to look at and think carefully about what the early goddesses meant. There is no room for dogma or inflexible structure, if we are to encourage people to have faith. We must give them the one arm, the one reach they have, the reach of the imagination.”63
God-Talk and Caribbean Literature: Fragments of a Conversation In the1970‟s Gordon Rohlehr64observed that Caribbean literature is “one of the places the theologian will need to explore” to “ask the age-old ultimate questions in a Caribbean accent”.65 While not too critical of his narrow understanding of the role of a theologian, (eg. liberation theologians from the two-thirds of the world do not necessarily dwell on outdated ultimate questions) Rohlehr‟s insight on the need for theology to dialogue with Caribbean literature is important. He went on to ask: “Does an artist have to conform to a system of belief in order to be able to make artistic use of the symbols or rituals of that belief?” If European writers have made use of the religious imagination of their time what should “stop the Caribbean artist from making effective use of such systems or fragments of systems” as they may find in their context.66 Much later, in 1992, Rohlehr is able to locate the significance of the “religious paradigm” as a “shape or trope accessible for aesthetic extension into form”.67 Referring to the works of Roger Mais and Kamau Brathwaithe, he notes how the sermon, testimony, the Bible, Anglican liturgical tones and Shouter rhythms have served as influential forces to the styles and content of the two Caribbean writers and much of Caribbean music. 68 Brathwaithe‟s collection of Barbajan Poems (1994), he notes, “illustrates the widespread view of the inseparability of the earthly and sacred in Caribbean life.” 69 Derek Walcott in his famous essay “The Muse of History” observed that “the subject African had come to the New World…with a profounder terror of blasphemy than the exhausted, hypocritical Christian. He understood too quickly the Christian rituals of a whipped, tortured, and murdered redeemer.”70 Walcott goes on to suggest that in addressing Christianity, “the captured warrior and the tribal poet had chosen the very
battleground which the captor proposed” not as a sign of “defeat” but rather, through “conversion” to reconstitute the cosmology of a European world. He notes: “[w]hat was captured from the captor was his God”71. Thus, the Rastafarians, as one example, hijacked “the oppressor‟s God in a move that sought to discommode the oppressor… [w]resting the Christian message from the Messenger.”72 While Walcott himself has no use for the institutional church and its high priests, he locates his faith in God (as a nonConformist) as significant to his creative imagination.73 His poetics “constantly uses language as rite: for invocation, praise, awe, all kinds of prayer...”74
Indeed, Caribbeans deploy religious imageries, stories and texts - especially the Bible to effectively construct a landscape of experience and to re-interpret the New World historical experience through the biblical texts and accounts of genesis, the psalms of lament,
the
prophets,
apocalyptic
writings
and
redemption/salvation.75
This
reconstruction and revision is related to the Caribbean peoples‟ struggles for justice, to become subjects of their history created in the imago Dei as any other person. Consequently, “[t]his struggle has made the Bible a valid text and a rich source of metaphors, images, and symbols for interpreting Caribbean history and articulating the vision of an alternative Caribbean.”76
The importance and influence of the Bible [as one religious text] and biblical narratives in the writings of Caribbean authors have been noted by a number of authors. Whether as a conscious or unconscious undertaking, biblical narratives with their archetypal stories are engraved on Caribbean minds and imaginations. Caribbean literature is laced with biblical/religious names, imageries, allusions, epigraphs, parallelisms etc. It is there in the works of Brathwaithe, Conde, Espinet, Goodison, Harris, Lamming, Selvon, Senior, Mais, Morris, Walcott and Zephaniah, just to mention a few . Thus, Olive
Senior can note that this is not surprising as she “grew up on the bible”.77 And for Ramabai Espinet the biblical narratives comprise of such “a potent source of myth and symbol within the English language” that it is only natural that this is integrated in her writings, deliberately or not.78
God-Talk in Caribbean Literature: Some Examples If it is not surprising that Caribbean writers/poets should “wrestle with the spiritual imperative that pervades their historical perspective,”79 what then are some of the themes running through Caribbean literature that have theological implications? How does Caribbean literature challenge the way in which Caribbean Christian theology has been written, read, understood and articulated?
A quick glance at writings of Caribbean writers will already point us to deeper themes and insights. For instance, Roger Mais‟s Brother Man (1954) highlights a Rastafarian Christ-Saviour figure, while The Hills were Joyful Together (1953) reveals how Christian beliefs shape the actions and attitudes of several characters. Earl Lovelace‟s The Wine of Astonishment (1982) that focuses on a small congregation of Spiritual Baptists underscores the integral relationship between Caribbean literature and the religious imagination. Jamaica Kincaid‟s At The Bottom of the River (1975) and Small Place (1989), Edwidge Danticant‟s Krik? Krak! (1996) and The Farming of Bones (1998), Michelle Cliff‟s Abeng (1984) and No Telephone to Heaven (1987) and Oliver Senior‟s Arrival of Snake Woman and Other Stories (1989) not only reclaim the mythic. More importantly, they counter the notion of women as representing sin/evil à la the biblical Garden of Eden and their work represent the potential for female agency, including a deep spirituality. Ismith Khan‟s The Crucifixion (1984) is a most interesting counter-discourse to the traditional Christian understanding of the Cross and redemption. Drawing on a Christ-like sacrificial death it is located in the context of
emptiness and violence in Trinidad and an individual‟s search for meaning in life. Jan Carew‟s The Wild Coast (1958), Andrew Salkey‟s A Quality of Violence (1959), Samuel Selvon‟s, “Turning Christian” in Jahaje Bhai: An Anthology of Indo-Caribbean Literature (1988) and the works of Edward Brathwaithe, Wilson Harris and Derek Walcott all draw from and point to the sacred and offer some profound revision for Caribbean God-talk.80
In the sub-sections that follow allow me to highlight in greater depth some of the themes and their theological connections that run through Caribbean literature. These are not exhaustive and merely scratch the surface of largely undiscovered resources for theology in the Caribbean.
Spinning/Re-visioning Biblical Texts & Theological Notions As a biblical theologian and hermeneut, I am interested in the use of the biblical allusions, imageries and narratives in Caribbean literature. I am particularly interested in the ways these (especially the narratives) are played with, revised and extended by writers and poets. I am keen on Wilson Harris‟s re-visioning of texts and theological notions not least because I sense that he symbolizes best the “midrash” tradition of pushing the boundaries, so quickly drawn around biblical texts, beyond the proclivity to be locked in dogmas and exactitudes. Of course, examples also abound from a variety of Caribbean writers and poets. Harris‟s works refer extensively to biblical notions, imageries, allusions and texts. Throughout The Guiana Quartet the notion of redemption, with much “spiritual” overtones, is evident. While there are some critics who note the “mystical” in Harris [a term contemporary liberation theologians rarely use] I agree with Hena Maes-Jelinek that there is an evident “reticence among critics to comment on the religious strain in his
fiction”.81 While Harris‟s works are free from “any institutional religious affiliation”, it is clear that “the self-sacrificial outcome of his characters‟ quest” and their salvific overtones as embodied in Donne and his crew (Palace of the Peacock), Cristo (The Whole Armour), Christ and the virgins (Jonestown), Anselm (The Four Banks of the River Space) and Dreamer (The Dark Jester) all point to the Christian tradition.82 Harris‟s imagination, however, moves beyond the Christian tradition to include a dialogue of and interplay with all religions and their gods and goddesses. The motive is clear: “subverting humanity‟s tendency to absolutize its necessarily partial views and of acknowledging that these are rooted in an immanent creative Spirit beyond them.”83
The Guiana Quartet is also filled with a number of biblical references from both testaments including biblical overtones associated with The Whole Armour and The Secret Ladder. Harris‟s use of these passages is very interesting. For instance, the Lukan reference “through the tender mercy of our God when the day shall dawn upon us from on high”84 is a reference to Zechariah‟s prophecy of the role of John the Baptist. The point of comparison, however, is that the child in the womb of the insignificant Beti (The Whole Armour) is to be the hope of the future community. The verse taken from the parable of “the wicked husbandmen”85 is located in the context of the rejected stone becoming the cornerstone. The rejected and marginalised Oudin becomes the agent of change and hope. Yet, there is a bigger picture if this is read from a postcolonial biblical perspective - the relationship of the husbandmen to colonial history and how this is repeated today. The foregoing are insights that Caribbean hermeneutics can employ in re-reading such texts.
Then there are the notions of journeying (Palace of the Peacock) and covenant (The Far Journey of Oudin) and the inversion of the seven days of creation as employed both in
The Palace of the Peacock and The Secret Ladder. As already noted, Harris does not strictly follow the Judeo-Christian pattern, but revises it to puncture any notion of a fixed and consecrated origin. I think Mary Lou Emery is spot on in comparing Harris‟s use of language to that of apophasis of the mystics in employing the method of “unsaying” or “speaking away what they have just said”, and in the process “opens up a new discourse”86 or new doors to an alternative narrative that resists closure or dogmatic exactitudes. This is akin to what I have hinted about the midrash tradition. Boeli van Leeuwen‟s, Het Teken van Jonah (Amsterdam 1988), which was translated by André Lefevere in 1995 (The Sign of Jonah (New York 1995), is not only a direct reference to the myth of Jonah but also filled with other biblical inferences from Revelation 6:887 and Matthew 12:3988 (in the epigraph). Clearly, the bible is one of van Leeuwen‟s intertexts89 as it is also a key text for the ordinary people of Curaçao whose approach to the biblical narratives is one of „biblical realism‟. He incorporates two visions in his text; that of the pale green horse of John (chaos, death, destruction) and that of the end vision, the whale (of resurrection, transformation and salvation). van Leeuwen re-works the symbol of the whale as one of death, resurrection and salvation with biblical overtones pointing to Christ: “For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth.”90 The Sign of Jonah is divided into four parts. In Part 1 the protagonist wanders around Willemstad, bored and waiting for a sign. In Parts II and III, the protagonist is off to wonderland - the imaginary/mythical land of Balboa where myths come alive - and in the company of Juan Carlos de Altamarino and his spouse, Laila. Here evil (unfortunately stereotyped as feminine) invites him to share in its plan which he refused and was sent back to Curaçao. In the final part, the protagonist is back in Curaçao banqueting in a sort of Jesus style with the prostitutes, chollers91 and the
impoverished. From this marginal space he delivers his „sermon on the mount‟, inverting/subverting the logic of the world and underscoring the „preferential option‟ of the oppressed and powerless. Arrested and thrown into prison he has his final vision (perhaps like John on the isle of Patmos) in which the protagonist/narrator has a spiritual experience and a sort of Isaiah vision of something new “where pigeons were sitting at the edge of the universe” and “dogs slept at the foot of the baptismal font”.92 Released from prison, and now blessed with „the sign of Jonah‟ - having divested himself of the chains of power - the protagonist experiences a freedom that provides a glimpse of salvation. Clearly, the work points to a pilgrimage, journey or quest: “one in Balboa, where the protagonist comes face to face with ultimate evil, and one in Curaçao, where he finally comes to terms with himself and his own mortality, achieving, through his vision, the eschatological insight that brings him peace.”93
Like the writers of Jonah and Revelation, readers are invited to participate in another way of representing the divine and creation that takes them beyond neatly defined formulas and sanitized dogmas. Boeli van Leeuwen reminds Caribbean God-talkers, through the employment of such an insignificant voice (Jonah) and in what is considered an insignificant corner of the earth, of the need for different interpretative skills - the imagination and emotion - in order to read the interplay between images and texts in a specific context. Jonah and Revelation are as much of significance to the Caribbean as it has been for the original context. They are timeless. Besides, such a replay in The Sign of Jonah is geared to unhinge/de-stabilize mindsets and expectations locked in rigid notions. Researchers in Caribbean hermeneutics would do well to read Boeli van Leeuwen.
Derek Walcott has some interesting things to say about the need to re-interpret the Hebrew paradigms that theologians use in their discourse, especially in the articulation of a liberation theology. Reflecting on the narratives related to the Hebrew tribes, their suffering, migration and hope of deliverance from bondage and Caribbean history, he observes: “There was this difference, that the passage over our Red Sea was not from bondage to freedom but its opposite, so that the tribes arrived at their New Canaan chained. There is this residual feeling in much of our literature, the wailing by strange waters for a lost home. It survives in our politics, the subdued search for a Moses. The epic concept was compressed in folk lyric, the mass longing in chanter and chorus, couplet and refrain”. 94
Walcott correctly notes that while “the Old Testament epics of bondage and deliverance provided the slave with a political parallel” there was a contradiction in terms of “the ethics of Christianity” which “tempered his vengeance and appeared to deepen his passivity.”95 The question is: How do we account for “the zeal with which the slave accepted both the Christian and the Hebraic, resigned his gaze to the death of his pantheon and yet deliberately began to invest a decaying faith with a political belief?”96 According to Walcott, one should not read this as defeat but “the willing of spiritual victory, for the captured warrior and the tribal poet had chosen the very battle ground which the captor proposed, the soul.” The God of the dominant was hijacked by the dominated, as the slave immediately grasped the meaning of a humiliated, whipped, crushed body hanging on the cross to their own situation.97
With this insight Walcott himself hijacks, questions and revises the notion of the Divine in the way he uses Genesis to retell the „origin‟ or „discovery‟ of the Antilles. This is located in “the lantern of a caravel and that was Genesis”98 The consequences as a result of this encounter are evident in the following lines: “Then there were the packed cries,/the shit, the moaning/ Exodus”99, which is also a clear reference to the biblical
story of exodus. He also employs the biblical narrative of the Ten Commandments and Ark of the Covenant, “mantled by the benediction of the shark‟s shadow”,100 to question the presence of the Divine (theodicy). Interestingly, Walcott‟s poem “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” is a very poignant re-working of theological notions using the title of a traditional Christmas Carol. Appropriating the rhetoric of repetition101, as is evident is such terms as „Black‟, „white‟, „broken‟ as well as description of the streets etc., Walcott offers a different lens or hermeneutic in an oppositional/subversive reading of the traditional Carol. Caribbean theology would do well to take lessons from these writers on re-reading texts. Re-Imaging Christ Theologies from Africa, Asia, Latin America, African-Americans, Native Americans and from feminist and womanist perspectives are answering the question of Jesus “Who do you say that I am?” through their own cultural and historical lenses. What shape(s) will the Caribbean answer to this question take? The nearest we have got to an authentic Caribbean answer is through the Rastafarian lens. Here one is immediately reminded of Roger Mais Brother Man (1954) as a contemporary Christ figure grown in the Jamaican context and Ismith Khan‟s re-play of the „Christ-like sacrificial death‟ in both The Jumbie Bird (1961) and The Crucifixion (1984). Is it possible that Caribbean writers, poets and artists are doing much work in re-positioning and answering this theological question?
Again, I am drawn towards Harris as his writings reflect a re-working of the Christ figure in an interesting cross-cultural dialogue that takes cultures and myths seriously. Hena Maes-Jelinek notes that the “self-sacrificial outcome of his characters‟ quest” (Cristo, Donne, Vigilance, Anselm, Bone, Dreamer) is “more than the ego yielding its supremacy to a recognition of Spirit”.102 They are loaded with salvific overtones (saving
the community) with antecedents in the Christian tradition, but not necessarily bound to it. Hence “Christ‟s tree and home”103 and the “huntsman Christ”104 figures are “highly unorthodox”.105
Moreover, he has some very challenging things to say about the Christian interpretation of Christ. In a “Round Table Discussion” Harris opines that Christ, in his view, “has not been properly or truly analysed from the four gospels we have.”106 Harris counters any attempt to absolutize the figure of Christ for in his view Jesus‟ transfiguration clearly implies paradox and the opening of gateways rather than “stricture” or “confinement”107 This is precisely what some of the contextual theologians mentioned earlier are trying to do. C. S. Song (from Taiwan) holds the view that Christ “is at the intersection of the divine dimension and the human dimension at every stage of history”.108 Korean feminist theologian Chung Hyun Kyung re-interprets Jesus through the lens of shamanism. Christ is seen as a priest (shaman) of the han – one who consoles the broken hearted, heals the afflicted and restores wholeness.109 The christological task as George Soares Prabhu (India) sees it “is not to repeat or elaborate the formulae of traditional Christology” nor “to adopt and adapt one or other Christological model from the New Testament” but to imagine “new christologies, by conforming to the cry for life which resounds in our Third World with our own experience of Jesus”. 110
Caribbean theology, as espoused by the established Churches is yet to seriously reflect upon the popular religiosity of Caribbeans in articulating a theology and hermeneutical method.111 Writers like Harris can help us in the endeavour, otherwise we will merely re-inscribe notions that flatten the depth and breadth of the questions that the Christ of the gospel poses. Harris, in his fiction and essays, for instance, suggests “that the resurrection of Christ has been fallaciously aligned to the conquest of Death or to a
structured immortality replete with one-sided bias.”112 As a theologian interested in biblical hermeneutics (especially postcolonial biblical criticism), I am yet to come across such a reading by any of the exegetes. I think that Harris is on to something, as he elaborates: “That the conquest of Death, the conquering of Death, is equated with the resurrection of Christ tells us much about ruling premises civilization plasters on the surfaces of language; such ruling premises upon language, such predatory coherence, tell us much-when we reflect upon it deeply-of the closed mind of the conquistadors who raped a continent under the banner of Christ.”113
Hence, in Resurrection on Sorrow Hill (1993) we have the ambivalent and complex relationship between Butterfly and Hope and a play on Christopher D‟eath: “the mystery of the resurrection of Christ is implicit in the Christopher faculty in D‟eath or Death”. The intention, according to Harris, is to revise our attempts to equate resurrection with “the conquest of Death”114 which, as already mentioned, leads to a one-sided confinement of immortality.
For, the irony of the Christian notion of conquering death is that such motivation led to crusades, inquisitions, roasting of heretics at the stake and “Othering” of the heathens, all in the effort of saving souls that one group determined as lost and in need of salvation. Indeed, much of this is still being repeated today. Harris is most perceptive in noting that “civilization remains in pawn to savage commandments, ruthless creeds and ideologies.”115 The crucial question is, how do we break through our “dogmatic exactitude or fanatical ideology and creed”? Harris points us in the direction of “unfinished genesis of the imagination” and the “rebirth of the epic” to an “infinite rehearsal” that breaches the claim of absoluteness and rigid dogmatic exactitude” opening up partial gateways into diversity that “sponsors the liberation of the orphaned Soul within re-visionary and plural masks”.116
It is evident that Harris seeks to subvert any attempt to absolutize the mysteries of the Divine economy, to articulate purist notions of redemption and instead endeavours to highlight the messiness and cross-culturalities of redemption.117 Harris moves us beyond any preoccupation with eternal salvation towards the salvific as new beginnings and new gateways with no inkling of certitude. Caribbean theologians will do well to reread the gospels‟ portrayal of Christ alongside voices like Harris. What we have before us are „treasures in earthen vessels‟, for the reality is that we only „see dimly in a mirror‟.
The Mythic: Liberating Theology The foregoing examples need to be located on a wider canvas. There is the need for Caribbean theology to reclaim myths as part of its God-talk. Writers such as Harris, Walcott and Michelle Cliff are extremely helpful in this regard. Michelle Cliff in both Abeng (1984) and The Land of Look Behind (1985) reclaims Caribbean history by offering counter-narratives of resistances that move from the culture of the Caribs to Castro in Cuba. As she explains in her preface to The Land of Look Behind (1985): “I strung together myth, dream, historical detail, observation, as I had done before, but I added native language.”118 Harris has consistently “argued for a perspective and methodology that would reconstitute the region‟s history to include larger spaces and forces: other landscapes, other pasts and mythologies.” 119For, as Harris notes: “…we are involved in an orchestration of imageries divine and human, creator and creature, Death and complex liberation from death-dealing regimes that embrace humanity in many areas of the globe. This desire for liberation is instinctive to ancient epic but it needs to be grasped differently, realized differently, it needs re-visionary capacities in our own age.” 120
To break out and move beyond restricting commandments, dead creeds and ingrained binary oppositions, there is the need for the rebirth of original epic and the mythic
which “offers a renewed scrutiny…of the unfulfilled promise of tradition and of descent and ascent all over again into inequalities, unequal cultures. It offers in stages a conversion of such inequalities into numinious inexactitudes” that can open up gateways “imbued with an inner immensity” and possibilities that propel us “into a future into which we arrive with hope, yet fear and trembling.”121
I sense in reading Walcott‟s Omeros and other poems, such a release, to use biblical parlance - as if mounting up on wings like eagles. While Walcott is taking issue with the euro-centric notion of history his reworking of Homeric analogies as best captured in his epic Omeros is also linked to notions of European theology. In my opinion a major project waiting to happen, in terms of Caribbean theology, is a similar reworking of biblical analogies in the context of the myths of the Caribbean, the Americas and lands of our ancestors.
Allow me to give you an idea of what I have in mind. In his essay on “The Caribbean Writer and Exile” (1999), Jan Carew recalls the following: “An Acewayo droger (porter in the interior of Guyana) once told me of the journeys he took in and out of the regions of his mind. The band across his forehead, and the harness strapped under his armpits distributed the hundred and twenty-five pounds he carried in his wareshi (Amerindian Backpack) so that by thrusting his head forward he could walk a steady, rhythmic shuffle from dayclean to sunset. We were averaging 25 miles a day in the mountainous Potaro District. “How do you manage?” I asked, thinking of the thirty pounds I was carrying and the way it seemed to double itself after every ten miles. After a long pause he replied: “It‟s like this, skipper, most of the time you see me walking here, carrying this big load, I‟m not here at all…is only a shadow here, the substance is back home in Aquero, hunting agouti or deer or labba, playing with my children, catching a gaff, listening to the Old Ones speak, talking to the Ancestors or to God. You can ask me how come I can be two places at the same time. I will tell you the secret: the pressure of this wareshi on my brain makes it easy for me to send my mind away… At the start I feel like a drunken man, there‟s singing inside my head, my body feels heavy and the wareshi feels like a mountain on my back. Then all of a sudden everything gets lighter and lighter until I feel like a silk cotton blossom floating in the wind. Once I reach this stage, I can walk from here to the Forest of the Long Night without feeling any weariness.” 122
Carew notes that for the larger part of his life the Acewayo droger was “outside the awful grinding inevitability of linear time that the Columbian era had imposed upon his people.”123 What is elucidating for me is when you juxtapose this alongside biblical narratives of enslavement and oppression, the Caribbean experience of slavery, Jesus‟ comment on the lightness of his yoke and burden124 and the Pauline comment on the Christian vocation as „burden bearing‟125. This “myth” helps me to re-enter these texts and notions of burden bearing with totally new eyes - the Caribbean mythic eyes.
Broken Language & Splintered Cups: Language and Hermeneutics Given Caribbean theologians‟ tendency to major in rigid and prescriptive language in their God-talk, we would do well to give heed to an insight of Harris. He notes: “There is a need unquestionably to read reality differently, so that we may release what is partial into dynamic and ceaseless momentum. There is a need for new doors in the body of language.”126
Harris notes that language “is changed and is animated by music and unspoken prayer”. Because the static/linear form of the European novel “is not adequate to convey this language”, Harris sees the need for a constant revision - an „infinite rehearsal‟ of what we read in the form of “a backwards-forwards movement” which illicits “unspoken prayers, prayers that cannot be given words, and yet we know that those words touch us, we know that that wordlessness touches us and moves us into a language that then breaks itself open to infinities.”127 This is the kind of language found in the vision of John of Patmos (Revelation). Likewise, Brathwaithe and Walcott see the transforming power of language in subverting the status quo of the inherited language. Hence, Brathwaithe‟s description of Caribbean language as “nation language”, that is the cry and shout of liberation.128 Walcott puts the issue of language for the Caribbean in these words:
“My race began as the sea began, with no nouns, and with no horizon, with pebbles under my tongue, with a different fix on the stars.” 129
The Caribbean writer places a high premium on the notion of the poet/writer as a creative and sacred agent of the „word‟.And integral to this is a relationship that “is analogous to that of God and creation”. Language is salvific, transforming in its reconception of self and the Caribbean world130 Brathwaithe‟s article, “Jazz and the West Indian Novel” (1967) in which he attempts to create an “alternative Caribbean aesthetic”131 has implications for a Caribbean hermeneutics. Louis James commenting on the importance of jazz as a paradigm for Brathwaithe notes that it is accessible and colourful, with a style that majors in creativity given the ability to “adapt and improvise through the method of performance”, that is “the actual moment of playing”. Moreover, it “has popular roots and draws on music experienced in common life in religion, work, dance, contemporary in its dissonance, flatness, fragmentation, restless syncopation, its clashing of scales and instrumentation.”132 As Brathwaithe used jazz to point to potential gateways that could be opened for new developments in indigenous culture and exploration of cultural roots, likewise Caribbean theology can employ jazz as a hermeneutic tool to release starched texts and dogmas. Recently my colleague, Black British theologian Anthony Reddie, has made a case for a jazz hermenutics in re-reading scriptures as he compares Jesus to a Jazz musician.133 In my essay “Wilson Harris, the Imagination and Infinite Rehearsal: A Theological Perspective”, I have drawn on Harris‟s notion of the infinite rehearsal as a method for Caribbean hermeneutics in which there is no final performance to the “play of humanity” or “the play of divinity”.134 For, to borrow from Brathwaithe and Harris, the jazz theologian “sees nothing” and “cares nothing” but “reaches to the sky” with “eyes closed”,135 mindful that the final performance is “but a privileged rehearsal
pointing to unsuspected facets and re-emergence of forgotten perspectives in the crosscultural and the universal imagination.”136 It is my contention that Caribbean poets and writers can help release Caribbean theologians from the „forced‟ theological jargons and lens for reading texts imposed on them by European languages, hermeneutical mindset and theology.
Memory, Re-member-ing & History Remembering/recalling is essential to our identity. It was Milan Kundera who noted that if you want to wipe out a people you erase their memories. Don Saliers notes that “[w]ithout the capacity to remember, we lack a sense of narrative about our lives and our world.”137 Religious narratives of creation, covenant, redemption, oracles, visions, encounters proclaimed, prophecies uttered, and good vanquishing evil are all corporate memories of one‟s religious tradition(s). In the Jewish Passover Seder, when the child asks the ritual question “Why is this night different from all other nights?”, the answer comes back in the form of a narrative re-member-ing deliverance of God‟s people from enslavement.
The act of recalling “is constitutive of faith itself and not a mere
elaboration of beliefs already held”.138 “I wear this past I borrowed/history bleeds behind my hallowed eyes,” writes Brathwaithe.139 Caribbean literature is steeped into the act of recalling and remembering in the search to articulate a historiography. Using the sacred space of the imagination, writers and poets combine memories past and history present to re-read the triumphs and horrors.140 “Where else to row, but backward?Beyond origins, to the whale‟s wash…” asks Walcott141 as he “recreates myth from folk tale”.142 Likewise, Edward Brathwaithe, through his poetics, reflects a shaman figure who “descends into the farthest reaches of
memory becoming the consciousness of his people at the same time as he unearths history and make new myths.”143 Harris also explores the role of memory by going back across pre-Christian cultures and drawing from a cross-culturality. I agree with TagoeWilson that in Harris‟s works “memory liberates only when it is linked with immateriality and with the continuous cycle of change and renewal that goes on in all his novels.”144 Harris‟s agenda is to free the Caribbean of a reductionist historiography which locks it in its deprivations, denying its people of any true sense of community.145 All three writers‟ emphases are geared towards releasing the Caribbean from a colonial and linear notion of history. When Klaus Klostermaier wrote that “only a paradox prepares the mind for a new experience”146 he may not have had the Caribbean in mind. Straddled between the assurance of landscape and mystery of seascape, Caribbeans embody paradox, which is at the heart of theology. Re-membering, re-writing, re-shaping history is also a deeply theological act and Caribbean theology must, therefore, wrestle with the history of the region, its ambiguities and paradoxes. Caribbean theologians have already raised the question of Caribbean history and its relationship to God‟s salvific plan.147 The crucial question is related to the parochialization of salvation history in terms of the European agenda which has been used to make an exclusive claim to a privileged relationship with the divine. It seems to me that Caribbean theologians can engage in a fruitful and challenging conversation with writers such as Harris, Walcott and Brathwaithe that can open up spaces that will affirm that no nation or people have a monopoly over the Divine and that the history of salvation and liberation is at the heart of all of human history. Christian salvation history, in my view, is merely a proto-type of what happens in all history.
Caribbean Suffering and the Good God (Theodicy) Western Christian theological discourse has articulated the notion of a good God, Creator of first things and all. That is, all of creation reflects God‟s wisdom. The sticking point has been the world of evil (past and present) especially when most of it has been committed by agents and servants and in the name of the Christian God. In defence of the goodness of God, we have theories ranging from the freedom of will to the argument that God allows evil to happen to make God‟s justice and goodness manifest.148 Suffering and evil are seen as moral necessity for God knows best. God, of course, works in all creatures but does not participate in their sins as God is above all of that. God‟s goodness, while impartial, is not necessarily for everyone. There is no place for the pagans of Africa, the Americas, and Asia who continue to pray to unknown gods and „breathe through the heats of their desire‟. The „chosen ones‟ (Europe/West) have been divinely commissioned to enter these „dark‟ corners of the earth to bring them the true divine light. Such theological positioning of theodicy articulated by western theologians is being countered by the multiplicity of theologies from Black, Asian, Latino/a, Rastafarian, Hispanic, Feminist, Womanist, and postcolonial perspectives.
The problem of suffering, evil and the role of a good God need re-working in Caribbean theology. Watty, Hamid, Williams and Potter have done some reflections in this area, but not to the extent to effect a change of God-talk in the pews and in church doctrines. Caribbean writers, on the other hand, have wrestled with and continue to wrestle with the problem of suffering/evil and in their own way call the above notions of theodicy into question. How can one defend a theodicy that on the one hand presents a God who is vulnerable in Christ who was nailed to a Cross and, on the other hand, one that removes God from any contact with evil on the premise that evil and suffering is a moral necessity? That surely falls flat in the face of the Caribbean history of
extermination of native Indians and the enslavement of Africans and Indians through slavery and indentureship. Roger Mais‟s two novels can serve as good starters for a conversation. The Hills Are Joyful (1953), drawing its title from the psalms, is set in a Kingston slum and gives us a profound insight into life among very poor people and the attempts to transcend the excruciating cycle of miseries in that context. While one can read the novel as exposing the degrading life of those at the bottom of the social ladder, there is a larger canvas on which Mais is working. How do we make sense, Mais is asking us, of the cruel and fatalistic world of Surjue, Rema, Flitters, Shag, Euphemia and Bajun Man in the light of the notion of a good God, creator of all? What is the relationship between the notion of fatalism which sees the whole community as victims of blind chance locked into structures and powers outside of their control and the view of a God who loves all, is in control and cares for all? In Mais‟s perception, Christian theology as articulated in the Caribbean is unable to offer an answer as it (especially the notion of theodicy) seems to be in contradiction to the reality experienced here. Hope, in Mais‟s view, lies in the community‟s ability to assume responsibility. Failure to do so spells death no matter what the understanding of theodicy. In wrestling with the question of theodicy, Mais in Brother Man turns to a Rastafarian (John Power) who bears much resemblance to the Christ figure. I suggest that Mais in grappling with the meaning of human lives in such context of abject poverty and violence within the Divine plan for the good of all creation, opens up the possibility for us to take more seriously the tragic nature of human vulnerability (specifically Caribbean) while not losing sight of systemic evil, the need to take a moral and collective responsibility to counter it, and at the same time not letting our notions of transcendent God sit too comfortably.
Another Caribbean writer who addresses the question of suffering and evil is Earl Lovelace. It has been pointed out that he is one of the Caribbean writers who have recognized the importance of religion and spirituality in Caribbean life. In addressing the problem of theodicy in the contemporary Caribbean, Earl Lovelace allows one of his characters in While Gods are Falling (1965) put the issue this way “I look for a God of this world, I look for God to come into Webber Street and down George Street and up Laventille. I look for God, or for the power of God…to do something about the poverty and oppression and the crime in the world. When I do not see an end to these things, when I see them continuing and getting worse, I ask, where is God? I ask, is God not of this world, is God a God of the Bible and of the dead, or God of the rich and not of the poor, and in some parts, God of the white and not of the black? You do not know how difficult it is, Mr Sylvestre. It is easier to say believe - quite easy. But when you are here, living next door to hooligans and prostitutes, when the girl next door is raped and the boy next door is charged for robbery, and the woman next door commits suicide, you know that God is not here, that He was never here. Look at the amount of churches in Portof-Spain! Look at the amount of masses that are sung, and the amount of gospels read! But look at this city and ask really ask yourself, if there is anything or anyone like God in it and you must answer no, there is no God here. If he was here, he has left. And I hear it is so all over the world.”149
His later novel The Wine of Astonishment(1980) that traces the survival of a small congregation of Spiritual Baptists is also about celebrating the ability to transcend oppression. The text actually opens with the narrator Eva trying to get her head around the „donkey years‟ of suffering her people had to endure. Hence, her question: “But what sin we commit? What deed our fathers or we do that so vex God that He rain tribulation on us for generations?”150 It seems to me that Lovelace is also exploring human vulnerability from a Caribbean perspective. While his major thrust is to locate redemption through suffering in the context of faith, he is not working with a notion that sees suffering and evil as a moral necessity to make God‟s goodness manifest. He is in fact questioning what kind of a God would allow this to happen and what to do about it. Lovelace is actually directing our gaze on both the oppressed and the oppressor, on the enemy within and without, on the afflicted persons as well as those who inflict the suffering/pain in a systemic manner.
Related to the notion of theodicy is that of the matter of the Imago Dei in the Caribbean person. Merle Collins states the issue quite powerfully. She writes: “God, they told me then/made me/in his own image and likeness/Almost.”151A fundamental premise for Caribbean theologising is that of the image of the divine in the Caribbean person - male and female. This is important given that the violence meted out on Caribbean peoples is related to the perception of their „humanness‟. For Christian Europe to enslave whole nations and peoples from the remotest corners of the earth, it had to find a way to rationalise that the people(s) were less than human beings and thus lacking of the Imago Dei. This is the context in which one needs to understand and locate the very radical claim of the Rastafarians that „God is [hu]man‟, that is, their humanizing of God. In remaking God in the image of the Caribbean human, “the tribe in bondage learned to fortify itself by cunning assimilation of the religion of the Old World. What seemed to be surrender was redemption. What seemed the death of faith was its rebirth.”152 Moreover, Collins challenge throws back the question to us Caribbean males about our oppression of women and re-inscribing of the very thing we are critiquing. Much of the poetry of Kamu Brathwaithe highlights the capacity of the human spirit “to rehumanize what it has dehumanised”153 According to Rohlehr, the poem, „Kingston in the kingdom of this world‟ originally entitled title „Good Friday‟, is in effect, an exploration of the present moment, that is, “the state of the spirit after centuries of enchainment.”154 This is one of the key questions that Black and liberation theologians have been asking in the immediacy of their theologising. It seems to me that Caribbean theologians can learn from Brathwaithe the art of connecting our „Kingstons‟, as a microcosm of the kingdom of the world, to highlight the general „lock down‟ of the Spirit. Brathwaithe is helpful to Caribbean theology as his aim is to expose the
shackling of Spirit with the triumph of the agenda of the kingdom of the world.155 Spirit here is word, gospel, freedom, authority of sunlight and imagination. This stands in contrast to the world‟s spirit, of the authority of the system which represents: imprisonment, torture, exploitation, evil “that condemns the Spirit to indefinite detention”.156 Spirit may be imprisoned, beaten, subjugated, but never totally defeated. There are always possibilities for regeneration and resurrection to happen. Theologians will find much to contemplate on in Brathwaithe‟s attempt at the re-discovery of Creator Spirit. In Christian terms the prevailing reading is that the Creator breathes life into inert matter. Brathwaithe, however, while literally equating Spirit with breath, images the inert medium involved in the act of inhaling the breath of the Spirit. Besides an emphasis on mutuality in creation, we find here the notion of liberation/release where “Spirit does not forgo matter, but energises, re-humanises it and inspires it” for the tasks of transformation.157
Paradise of Paradoxes: Land, Sea and Nature: Eco-theology In spite of the contradictions and force of nature and the violent history of colonization and slavery in the Caribbean, the region‟s landscape/seascape and its rhythm become sites of reconciliation and healing in Caribbean literature. Unlike the colonial Christian mindset of seeing nature to be “exploited, harnessed and quelled”, the Caribbean (land, sea and nature) becomes a living “spiritual force”158 for our artists, poets and writers. Wilson Harris puts it this way: “…[F]or a long time, landscapes and riverscapes have been perceived as passive, as furniture, as areas to be manipulated; whereas, I sensed, over the years, as a surveyor, that the landscape possessed resonance. The landscape possessed a life, because, the landscape, for me, is like an open book, and the alphabet with which one worked was all around me.”159
For some time now Caribbean writers, such as Harris, have held the view that the sacramentality of nature is central “to regenerating the value of the Caribbean self”160.
In “Bible on the Hill”, Howard Fergus draws heavily on biblical imageries to make sense of the havoc caused by volcanic eruption. So, we read how “Soufriere opened a new bible/in her pulpit on the hills” and “in symbols red like fire”.161 Olive Senior, in her collection of poems in Gardening in the Tropics (1995) offers a skilful re-visioning of Caribbean landscape/nature and the inseparable relationship with its people, their religions, faith and history. I sense also in the writings of Harris an understanding of lands, seas, rivers, rocks, bones and forest as sacramental. I suggest that he (like the other Senior and Fergus) is challenging Christians to re-visit the notion of the sacramental in the wider canvas of the whole of creation for therein can one catch a glimpse of the interplay between sacrifice and “the g[host] of a chance” of redemption for the whole of creation.162 Likewise, in the poetics of Walcott the environment is represented as an “inspiring source of [the] creation of identity”163 Mindful of the rape of the region Walcott, in an effort at re-reading the „Adamic‟ narrative, puts the exploitation in paradise (the Caribbean) in poignant perspective. He writes: So when Adam was exiled/to our New Eden, in the ark‟s gut,/the coined snake coiled there for good fellowship also;/ that was willed./Adam had an idea/He and the snake would share/the loss of Eden for a profit./So both made the New World./ And it looked good. 164
Walcott, goes in Omeros to use the island of St.Lucia, its landscape and seascape to articulate a hopeful, dynamic and cross-cultural/religious spirituality of Caribbean peoples. Interestingly, he compares St. Lucia with John‟s Patmos of Revelation.165 It is John of Patmos who imagines that utopian heavenly city - in effect the restoration of paradise: „as it was in the beginning‟. In “The Sea is History” found in The Star Apple Kingdom, Walcott offers a good link between Caribbean history and the environment. The Caribbean Sea is represented as offering an alternative history and is linked to the „new song‟ of the psalmist, the fall of Babylon and her gods and creation singing God‟s praise (One can perhaps make a link with Ephesians 1:9-10 here!). Walcott‟s concern is
the search for a restored/healed Caribbean identity through the environment or natural elements “using dense imagery of nature as text, the sea and nature as sources of identity, as well as the sea as a source of rhythm, together with the idea of the language of nature and the renaming in the new language of the colonizers.”166
But as Victoria Carchidi rightly points out, Walcott remains locked in the “colonialist trope of equating women with the land” and in the process re-inscribe western dualisms.167 Women writers like Edwidge Danticat, Erna Brodber and Olive Senior are voices that counter such dualisms in their discerning of the sacredness in the Caribbean environment. Moreover, they puncture and revise the myth of the biblical garden that is equated with England which dominates the Caribbean mind.168 I sense in the revisioning and the continuing need to do so a significant insight that a Caribbean theology of creation may well need to draw on as it attempts to re-configure Caribbean God-talk.
From a theological perspective, I am also interested in putting the rape of the region within the wider degradation of the whole of creation as a result of the greed of powerful adventurers (past and present). I want to read the „groaning of creation‟ and an endangered planet within this framework. For “whether in the form of imbalance in nature created by humans, discrimination and inequality in human relationships, injustice, wanton destruction of the ecosystem, depletion of the ozone layer”,169 ecological degradation is a theological issue as it works against the „goodness” of God‟s creation. It seems to me that Caribbean writers and theologians can do some joined up thinking in response to our present ecological crisis that demands a common agenda for a sustainable future that would “transform relationships of domination and exploitation into relationships of mutual support.”170 Like Caribbean literature, our God-talk needs
to become truly incarnational, that is earth-bound or earth-talk in order to “effect our conversion to earth”171 rather than abandoning it for a „pie somewhere in the sky‟. I envision a fruitful conversation with Harris, Walcott, and Senior and others. A Luta Continua…. The foregoing discourse is merely an attempt to give shape to fragments of my thinking. In this discourse, conversation is an operative metaphor for me. It is a conversation to be continued. I perceive the nature of this undertaking as an opportunity “to fund” the imagination by “voicing of a lot of little pieces out of which [we] can put life together in fresh configurations.172 I am hopeful of the ripe possibilities of such fresh configurations and re-configurations. Caribbean God-talk needs to be authentic to its calling - to plug into reality and ask the hard and difficult questions. It can learn from Caribbean literature to risk re-thinking, re-visioning and re-imagining in order to open up spaces where play, difference, transformation and paradoxes can live together. 173 It is these spaces that authentic God-talk is birthed, lives and breathes - not in our neat, sanitized dogmas and our penchant for quick answers to complex questions driven by an obsession for stricture and certainty.
Dr. Michael N. Jagessar Queens College, Birmingham m.n.jagessar@queens.ac.uk June 30, 2005
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Gordon Collier, “„At the Gate of Cultures‟ of the New World: Religion, Mythology, and Folk-Belief in West Indian Poetry” in And the Birds Began to Sing: Religion and Literatures in Post-Colonial Contexts edited by Jamie S. Scott (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), p.227 [pp.227-249] 2 Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island. Tr. by James Maraniss (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1992), p.17. 3 Silvio Torres-Saillant, “The Cross-Cultural Unity of Caribbean Literature” in A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Volume 3. Cross-Cultural Studies. Edited by A. James Arnold (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997), pp.57-78. He argues a case “for the inclusion of religion and language among major paradigms that permit the study of Caribbean literature as an object of inquiry.” [p.70]. 4 Ibid., pp.70-71. 5 Ibid., p.85. 6 Mangru Basdeo, “Tadjah in British Guiana: Manipulation or Protest?” in Indenture and Abolition (Toronto: TSAR Publications, 1993), pp.43-58; Miguel Barnet, Afro-Cuban Religions. Translated by Christine Renata Ayorinde (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers & Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2001); Roger Bastide, African Civilizations in the New World. Trans. Peter Green (London: C. Hurst and Company, 1971); Martha Beckwith, Black Roadways: A Study of Jamaican Folk Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1929) and The Hussay Festival in Jamaica (Poughkeepsie, N.Y.: Vassar College, 1924); Barry Chevannes, Rastafari: Roots and Ideology (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998); Leslie, Desmangles, The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Margarite Fernández Olmos & Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santeria, Obeah, and the Caribbean (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997); Healing Cultures: Art and Religion as Curative Practices in the Caribbean and Its Diaspora (New York: Palgrave-St. Martin‟s Press, 2001); Creole Religions of the Caribbean: An Introduction from Vodou and Santeria to Obeah and Espiritismo (New York: New York University Press, 2003); Frances Henry, Reclaiming African Religions in Trinidad: The Socio-Political Legitimation of the Orisha and Spiritual Baptist Faiths (Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2003); Aisha Khan, Callaloo Nation: Metaphors of Race and Religious Identity Among South Asians in Trinidad (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Frank J. Korom, Hosay Trinidad: Muharram Performances in an Indo-Caribbean Diaspora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Miguel A. De La Torre, Santería: The Beliefs and Rituals of a Growing Religion in America (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004); Elizabeth McAlister, Rara! Vodou Power, and Performance in Haiti and its Disaspora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Dianne M. Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005 Ivor Morrish, Obeah, Christ and Rastaman: Jamaica and Its Religions (Cambridge, England: James Clark, 1982); John W. Pulis, ed., Religion, Diaspora and Cultural Identity: A Reader in the Anglophone Caribbean. With a foreword by John F. Szwed and Afterword by Richard Price (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach Publishers, 1999); Steven Vertovec, Hindu Trinidad (London: Macmillan, 1992). Aisha Khan makes an interesting point with regard to the study of Caribbean religions. She notes: “In the Caribbean, the study of religions has not had a prolific or particularly varied tradition of research relative to studies of religion in other parts of the world or, for that matter, to other research foci in the Caribbean. Emphasis here has been directed largely to practices that are syncretisms of African indigenous and European Christian belief systems, and to variations of Christianity among peoples of African descent. Although attention is directed to syncretic processes, the religions involved are often treated (implicitly or otherwise) as initially discrete units that work in tandem, rather than as multi-dimensional and overlapping arenas of beliefs and practices that are mutually constitutive in different ways, depending on context.” (p.251). She goes on to note three criteria when exploring Caribbean religions: “…distinguishing the mundane (“rational”) from the fantastic, the faith-driven from superstition, the authorized or ecclesiastical from the subversive, and the moments where these distinctions are unclear. Moreover, we need to consider, rather than assume, when and why qualifying as „religion‟ is locally important to begin with.” (p.251). See, Aisha Khan, “On the „Right Path‟: Interpolating Religion in Trinidad,” in Religion, Diaspora, and Cultural Identity: A Reader in Anglophone Caribbean edited by John W. Pulis (Netherlands: Gordon and Breach Publishers, 1999), pp.247-276. 7 Robert Beckford, God of the Rahtid: Redeeming Rage (London: DLT, 2001) p.52. 8 Althea Prince, “How Shall We Sing the Lord‟s Song in a Strange Land? Constructing the Divine in Caribbean Contexts,” in Nation Dance: Religion, Identity, and Cultural Difference in the Caribbean
edited by Patrick Taylor (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp.25-26 [pp.2531] 9 See, Aisha Khan, Callaloo Nation: Metaphors of Race and Religious Identity among South Asians in Trinidad (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1999). She notes that “[a]nthropologists and others have striven to demonstrate the vibrant re-creations and syncretisms that constitute religions traditions in the Americas.” [p.252] 10 George Mulrain, Theology in Folk Culture: The Theological Significance of Haitian Folk Religion (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Peter Lang, 1984) 11 Gerald Boodoo, “The Faith of the People: The Divina Pastora Devotions in Trinidad,” in Religion, Culture and Tradition in the Caribbean edited by Hemchand Gossai and Nathaniel Murrell (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 2000), pp.65-72. His essay is a re-print of an earlier piece of research done in the 1990‟s. The anthology of essays focuses on the Bible as the most widely read and influential book in the Caribbean (oppressively and as liberation) and attempts to explore new hermeneutical connections mindful of the range of hermeneutical schools including, Black, Feminist, Womanist, and postcolonialist etc. 12 Patrick Taylor, The Narrative of Liberation: Perspectives on Afro-Caribbean Literature, Popular Culture, and Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1999) and Taylor (ed.), Nation Dance: Religion, Identity: Religion, Identity and Cultural Difference in the Caribbean (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001). 13 Burton Sankeralli, At the Crossroads: African Caribbean Religion and Christianity (Trinidad & Tobago: Caribbean Conference of Churches, 1995). 14 Noel Erskine, Decolonizing Theology: A Caribbean Perspective (Maryknoll New York: Orbis Books, 1981). 15 Lewin Williams, Caribbean Theology (New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc.,1994). 16 Samuel Murrell, William Spencer, Adrian McFarlane eds., Chanting Down Babylon: The Rastafari Reader (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988). See especially Section IV on “Religion, Livity, Hermenutics, and Theology. 17 Patrick Taylor, The Narrative of Liberation: perspectives on Afro-Caribbean Literature, Popular Culture, and Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). He suggests that Caribbean writers “draw from a popular tradition of resistance that still lives in religion and language, tales, music, song, poetry, and drama”. [p.228] 18 Darren J.N. Middleton, “Riddim Wise and Scripture Smart: Interview and Interpretation with Ras Benjamin Zephaniah,” in Religion, Culture, and Tradition in the Caribbean edited by Hemchand Gossai and Nathaniel Samuel Murrell (Basingstoke, London: MacMillan Press Ltd., 2000), pp.257-270. 19 With regard to Caribbean literature, one can reasonably argue that much of the literary discourse and criticism focuses on language and cultures re: Caribbean identity, history and cultural production. But, just as language and culture(s) have shaped Caribbean identity and history, so too one can convincingly contend have religion(s), faith and spirituality (as a repeated regularity). 20 Melvin B. Rahming, “Theorizing Spirit: The Critical Challenge of Elizabwth Nunez‟s When Rocks Dance and Beyond the Limbo Silence,” in Studies in the Literary Imagination (Fall 2004), pp.1-17. [p.2] 21 Ibid., pp.2-3. 22 Gordon Rohlehr, “Man‟s [sic] Spiritual Search in the Caribbean Through Literature,” in Troubling of the Waters edited by Idris Hamid (Trinidad: Rahaman Printery Ltd., 1973), pp.187-204]. See also, The Shape that Hurts and Other Essays (Port-of-Spain: Longman Trinidad, 1992). 23 Jennifer Rahim, “Patterns of Psalmology in Lovelace‟s The Wine of Astonishment”, in Caribbean Journal of Religious Studies 16/2 (September 1995), pp.3-17. 24 Gordon Collier, “„At the Gate of Cultures‟ of the New World: Religion, Mythology, and Folk-Belief in West Indian Poetry” in And the Birds Began to Sing: Religion and Literatures in Post-Colonial Contexts edited by Jamie S. Scott (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), pp.227-249. 25 This is an excellent essay in which Collier gives an important overview of the relationship between Caribbean poetics and religion, mythology and folk-belief. 26 Jamie S. Scott & Paul Simpson-Housley, Mapping the Sacred: Religion, Geography and Postcolonial Literatures (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001). 27 Paula Burnett, Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics (Gainsville, Florida: University of Florida Press, 2000). 28 Cf. C.S. Song, Third-Eye Theology: Theology in Formation in Asian Settings (Guildford & London: Lutterworth Press, 1980), p.10.
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See, Michael Jagessar, Life in All Its Fullness (Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum, 1997), p.127; See also, Anthony Reddie, Faith, Stories and the Experience of Black Elders: Singing the Lord’s Song in a Strange Land (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2001), p.40. 30 A caveat in terms of my interest in this conversation is both necessary and appropriate. I am Caribbean theologian by training with a keen interest in Caribbean culture, identity, religions and literature. My MA research is in the area of theology and Caribbean literature (specifically the works of Wilson Harris) and my PhD work on a life and work of a Caribbean theologian (Philip Potter) the first Black leader of the World Council of Churches. I teach Interfaith Studies, Black and Asian Theologies and Post-Colonial Biblical Hermeneutics. 31 Austin Clarke, “Easter Carol,” in When He was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silk: Stories (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, Ltd., 1971), p.5. 32 Michael Jagessar, “Wilson Harris, the Imagination and the „Infinite Rehearsal‟: A Theological Perspective” in Wilson Harris: The Uncompromising Imagination edited by Hena Maes-Jelinek (Australia: Dangaroo Press, 1991), p.224. [pp.221-229]. Here I was drawing on an insight of the late Dr. Idris Hamid, In Search of New Perspectives (Trinidad: CCC, 1972), p.8. 33 Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982), p.17. 34 Rudolph Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology (London: SCM, 1960). Bultmann‟s agenda was based on his diagnosis that the “modern” European person cannot take myth and had little time for that. The problem is that Bultmann and others saw it fit to speak on behalf of the rest of humankind. 35 Song, Third-Eye Theology: Theology in Formation in Asian Settings (Guildford & London: Lutterworth Press, 1980), p.11. 36 Cf. Gordon Kaufman, Theology for a Nuclear Age (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985). 37 cf. John Bowker, Hallowed Ground: Religions and the Poetry of Place (London: SPCK, 1993). 38 Song, Third-Eye Theology: Theology in Formation in Asian Settings (Guildford & London: Lutterworth Press, 1980), p.83. 39 Sallie McFague, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), p.19. 40 See, B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, H. Tiffin eds., The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in PostColonial Literatures (New York: Routledge, 1995), p.283. 41 Musa Dube, Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (St. Louis, Missouri: Chalice Press, 2000); Musa Dube and Jeffrey Staley, John and Postcolonialism: Travel, Space and Power (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002); Fernando Segovia, Interpreting Beyond Borders (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000); Kwok Pui-lan, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology (London: SCM Press, 2005); R.S. Sugirtharajah, ed., The Postcolonial Bible (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998); R.S. Sugirtharajah, Postcolonial Criticism and Biblical Interpretation (Oxford: OUP, 2002); R.S. Sugirtharajah, Postcolonial Reconfigurations: An Alternative Way of Reading the Bible and Doing Theology (London: SCM Press, 2003). 42 See Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Representations of the Orient (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). Said‟s monumental work together with Frantz Fanon‟s writings have greatly influenced postcolonial scholarship. Two other significant voices are Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi K. Bhabha. 43 Jagessar, “Wilson Harris, the Imagination and the „Infinite Rehearsal‟: A Theological Perspective” (1991), p.224. 44 Wilson Harris, “A Talk on the Subjective Imagination,” in Explorations edited by Hena Maes-Jelinek (Aarhus: Dangaroo Press, 1981), p.57. See also, “Literacy and the Imagination” in The Literate Imagination: Essays on the Novels of Wilson Harris, edited by Michael Gilkes (London: Macmillan, 1989) 45 Michael Gilkes, ed., The Literate Imagination: Essays on the Novels of Wilson Harris (London: Macmillan, 1989), p.ix. 46 Wilson Harris, The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination (Westport, Connecticut: greenwood Press, 1983), p.xviii. 47 Paula Burnett, Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics (Gainsville, Florida: University of Florida Press, 2000), p.100. [The first emphasis is mine.] 48 Harris, “Literacy and the Imagination,” in The Literate Imagination, edited by Michael Gilkes (1989), pp.23-24. 49 Walter Brueggemann, Hopeful Imagination: Prophetic Voices in Exile (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), pp.25-26.
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Wilson Harris, “Literacy and the Imagination,” in The Literate Imagination: Essays on the Novels of Wilson Harris, edited by Michael Gilkes (London & Basingstoke: Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1989), p.15 [pp.13-30] 51 See, Choan S. Song, Theology from the Womb of Asia (London: SCM Press Ltd., 1988), pp.8-16. 52 See Harvey Cox, The Feast of Fools: A Theological Essay on Festivity and Fantasy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1969), p.62ff. 53 Alexander Dru, ed., and trans., The Journal of Kierkegaard (London: Collins Fontana Books, 1958), p.243. 54 Aritha van Herk, A Frozen Tongue (Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1992), p.107. 55 I refer especially to the following: Hopeful Imagination: Prophetic Voices in Exile (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986); The Prophetic Imagination (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978); and Finally Comes the Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989). 56 Brueggemann, Finally Comes the Poet (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), pp.4-5. 57 Bruggemann, Hopeful Imagination: Prophetic Voices in Exile (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), p.2. 58 Midrash means to “seek out” or “to inquire”. It is used in a dual way to describe a method and a genre of literature in which the imagination is used extensively in the interpretation and re-interpretation of biblical texts to release and extend the texts to existential experiences. 59 I understand boundary as more than the perception of where things separate. I perceive boundary as the edge or margin where things join and assume new shapes. 60 Barbara Brown Taylor, “Never-Ending Story” in Christian Century 120/5 (March 8, 2003), p.37 61 Bruggemann, Hopeful Imagination (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), p.24. 62 cf. Paul Ricoeur, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, edited by C. Reagan and D. Stewart (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979). 63 Aritha van Herk, A Frozen Tongue (Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1992), p.119. 64 Rohlehr, “Man‟s [sic] Spiritual Search in the Caribbean Through Literature” in Idris Hamid (ed.), Troubling of the Waters (Trinidad: Rahaman Printery Ltd., 1973), pp.187-204. 65 Ibid., p.190. 66 Ibid., p.199-200. 67 Gordon Rohlehr, The Shape that Hurts and Other Essays (Longman Trinidad Ltd, 1992), p.5. 68 Ibid., pp.21-24. 69 Ibid., p.70. 70 O. Coombs ed., Is Massa Day Dead? (New York: Anchor Press, Doubleday, 1974), pp.1-12. 71 Ibid., p.11. 72 Rex Nettleford, “Discourse on Rastafarian Reality,” in Chanting Down Babylon, ed. Nathaniel Samuel Murrell, William David Spencer, and Adrian Anthony McFarlane (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), p.315. 73 Walcott speaking at University of Milan (May 22nd, 1996) and as quoted by Paula Burnett, Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics (2000), p.101. 74 Ibid., p.101. 75 See, Diane J. Austin-Broos, “Pentecostal Community and Jamaican Hierarchy” in Religion, Diaspora and Cultural Identity: A Reader in the Anglophone Caribbean edited by John W. Pulis (Netherlands: Gordon and Breach Publishers, 1999), p.227. [pp.215-245]. 76 Leslie R. James, “Text and the Rhetoric of Change: Bible and Decolonization in Post-World War II Caribbean Political Discourse,” in Religion, Culture and Tradition in the Caribbean, edited by Hemchand Gossai and Nathaniel Murrell (Basingstoke, London: MacMillan, 2000), p.162. 77 Kwame Dawes, Talk you Talk: Interviews with Anglophone Caribbean Poets (Charlottesville & London: University Press of Virginia, 2001), p.85. 78 Ibid., p.123. 79 Silvio Torres-Saillant, Caribbean Poetics: Toward An Aesthetic of West Indian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p.88 80 See, Silvio Torres-Saillant, Caribbean Poetics: Toward an Aesthetic of West Indian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) where a similar point is made. 81 Hena Maes-Jelinek, “Introduction: Approaching Wilson Harris‟ Creatvity,” in Theatre of the Arts: Wilson Harris and the Caribbean, edited by Hena Maes-Jelinek and Bénédicte Ledent (Amsterdam-New York, NY: Rodopi, 2002), p.xiv [pp.ix-xxi]. 82 Ibid., p.xiv. 83 Ibid., p.xvi. 84 Luke 1:78. 85 Luke 20:9
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Mary Lou Emery, “The Poetics of Vision in Wilson Harris‟s Writing,” in Theatre of the Arts: Wilson Harris and the Caribbean, (Amsterdam-New York, Rodopi, 2002), p.121 [pp.111-123] 87 “I looked and there was a pale green horse! Its rider‟s name was Death and Hades followed with him..” [NSRV] 88 “An evil and adulterous generation asks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.” [NSRV] 89 See, André Lefevere, “Boeli van Leeuwen‟s The Sign of Jonah: Eschatology in the Dutch Caribbean” in Sisyphus and ElDorado: Magical and Other Realisms in Caribbean Literature edited by Timothy J. Reiss (Trenton NJ: Africa World Press, Inc., 2002). 90 Matthew 12:40 [NSRV] 91 This refers to people who are either drug addicts or alcoholics or a combination of both. It is a Papiamentu (local dialect) word. 92 Boeli van Leeuwen, The Sign of Jonah (New York: Perpetual Press, 1995). Translated from Dutch by André Lefevere 93 André Lefevere, “Boeli van Leeuwen‟s The Sign of Jonah: Eschatology in the Dutch Caribbean” (2002), p.61. 94 Derek Walcott, What the Twilight Says: Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), pp.44-45 [pp.36-64]. 95 Ibid., p.45. 96 Ibid., p.45. 97 Ibid., pp.46-47. 98 Walcott, “The Sea is History” in Collected Poems 1948-1984 (London.Boston:Faber & Faber, 1992), p.364. 99 Ibid., p.364 100 Ibid., p.364 101 José Luis Martínez-Dueñas Espejo & José María-Fernández, Approaches to the Poetics of Derek Walcott (Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2000), pp.139-147. 102 Hena Maes-Jelinek, “Introduction: Approaching Wilson Harris‟s Creativity,” in Theatre of the Arts (2002), p.xiv [pp.ix-xii]. Here Maes-Jelinek was commenting on Henry Paget‟s discourse on the „Spirit‟ in Harris‟ work. 103 Harris, Palace of the Peacock (London: Faber & Faber, 1960), p.137. 104 Ibid., p.152 105 Hena Maes-Jelinek, “Introduction: Approaching Wilson Harris‟s Creativity,” in Theatre of the Arts (2002), p.xv. 106 “Round Table: Wilson Harris and Caribbean Literature”,” in Theatre of the Arts: Wilson Harris and the Caribbean, (Amsterdam-New York, Rodopi, 2002), p.243 [pp.231-247] 107 Wilson Harris, “An interview with Wilson Harris in Macerata,” in Resisting Alterities: Wilson Harris and Other Avatars of Otherness, edited by Marco Fazzini (Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2004), p.61 [pp.53-64] 108 C.S. Song, Christian Mission in Reconstruction: An Asian Attempt (Madras: CLS, 1975), p.61 109 Chung Hung Kyung, Struggle to be the Sun Again: Introducing Asia Women’s Theology (Orbis Books, Maryknoll: 1999). 110 George Soares Prabhu, “The Jesus of Faith: A Christological Contribution to an Ecumenical Third World Spirituality,” in Spirituality of the Third World, edited by K.C. Abraham, Bernadette Mbuy-Beya (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1994), p.139 [pp.139-164] 111 One recent attempt is the work of Dianne Stewart. Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 112 Harris, “Quetzalcoatl and the Smoking Mirror: Reflections on Originality and Tradition,” in Sisyphus and Eldorado: Magical and Other Realisms in Caribbean Literature, edited by Timothy J. Reiss (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, Inc., 2002), p.8[pp.1-14] 113 Ibid., p.9. 114 Ibid., p.8 115 Ibid., p.12. 116 Ibid., p.12 117 It would be a fascinating exercise to compare Harris‟s insights with the work of Marion Grau, Of Divine Economy: Refinancing Redemption (New York, London: T&T Clark International, 2004). 118 Michelle Cliff, The Land of Look Behind (Ithaca: New York, 1985), p.16. 119 Nana Wilson-Tagoe, Historical Thought and literary representation in West Indian Literature (Orlando: University Press of Miami; Jamaica: University Press of the West Indies, 1998), p.33
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Wilson Harris, “Quetzalcoatl and the Smoking Mirror: Reflections on Originality and Tradition” in Sisyphus and Eldorado: Magical and Other Realisms in Caribbean Literature , edited by Timothy Reiss, (Trenton, NJ & Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press, Inc., 2002) p.7 121 Ibid., p.12 122 Jan Carew, “The Caribbean Writer and Exile” in Onyekachi Wambu (ed), Empire Windrush: Fifty Years of Writing About Black Britain. With preface by E. R. Braithwaite. (Phoenix: London, 1999), p300. [pp.281-306]. 123 Ibid., p.300. 124 Matthew 11:30 125 Galatians 6:1 126 Harris, “Intuition, Myth, Imagination, Memory,” in How Novelists Work edited by Maura Dooley (Bridgend, Wales: Poetry Wales Press, 2000), p.29 [pp.45-55] 127 Marina Camboni & Marco Fazzini, “An Interview with Wilson Harris in Macerata,” in Resisting Alterities: Wilson Harris and Other Avatars of Otherness, edited by Marco Fazzini (Amsterdam-New York, NY: Rodopi, 2004), pp.54-55 [pp.53-64] 128 Kamau Brathwaithe, History of the Voice (London: New Beacon, 1984), p.13. 129 Derek Walcott, “Names” in Seagrapes (New York: Farrar, 1976), p.32. 130 June D. Bobb, Beating A Restless Drum: The Poetics of Kamau Brathwaithe and Derek Walcott (Trento,NJ & Asmara Eritrea: Africa World Press, Inc. 1998), p.153. 131 Edward Brathwaithe, “Jazz and the West Indian Novel” in BIM 44(1967), 46 (1968). As quoted by Louis James, “Brathwaithe and Jazz” in The Art of Kamau Brathwaithe (Glamorgan: Poetry Wales Press Ltd.,) , p.62 [pp.62-74] 132 Ibid., p.62-64. 133 Anthony G. Reddie Nobodies to Somebodies: A Practical Theology for Education and Liberation (Peterborough: Epworth Press, 2003). 134 Michael Jagessar, “Wilson Harris, the Imagination and the „Infinite Rehearsal‟: A Theological Perspective,” in Wilson Harris: The Uncompromising Imagination, edited by Hena Maes-Jelinek (Belgium: Dangaroo Press, 1991), pp.221-229. 135 Brathwaithe, Other Exiles, p.13 136 Wilson Harris, The Inifinite Rehearsal (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), p.vii. 137 Don E. Saliers, Worship and Spirituality (Akron, Ohio: OSL Publications, 1996), p.6. 138 Ibid., p.8. 139 Brathwaithe, The Arrivants. 140 June D. Bobb, Beating A Restless Drum: The Poetics of Kamau Brathwaithe and Derek Walcott (Trento,NJ & Asmara Eritrea: Africa World Press, Inc. 1998), p.33. 141 Derek Walcott, The Castaway, (p.21)] 142 Nana Wilson-Tagoe, Historical Thought and literary representation in West Indian Literature (Orlando: University Press of Miami; Jamaica: University Press of the West Indies, 1998), p.182. This is with specific reference to Walcott‟s Ti-Jean and His Brothers. 143 Ibid., p.184. 144 Ibid., p.272. 145 See Harris, Explorations, pp.20-42. 146 Klostermaier, Kristvidya: A Sketch of an Indian Christology (Bangalore: CISRS, 1967), p.20. 147 See Hamid, Troubling of the Waters (Trinidad: Rahaman Printery Ltd., 1973). Note especially William Watty‟s article. 148 See , G. W. Leibniz, Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil (Chicago: Open Court, 1998). 149 Earl Lovelace, While Gods are Falling (Collins, 1965) p.151. 150 Earl Lovelace, The Wine of Astonishment (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1982), p.1. 151 Merle Collins, “A Journey” in Rotten Pomerack (London: Virago, 1992). 152 Derek Walcott, What the Twilight Says: Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), p.43 [pp.36-64]. 153 Gordon Rohlehr, p.250. 154 Ibid., p.252 155 Gordon Rohlehr, p.254. 156 Ibid., p.255. 157 Ibid., p.261 158 Ian Gregory Strachan, Paradise and Plantation: Tourism and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean (Charlottesville & London: University of Virginia Press, 2002), p.195.
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Wilson Harris, “The Music of Living Landscapes,” in Selected Essays of Wilson Harris, edited by Andrew Bundy (London: Routledge, 1999), p.41 [pp.40-46] 160 Strachan, Paradise and Plantation (University of Virginia Press, 2002), p.195. 161 Howard Fergus, Lara Rains and Colonial Rites (Leeds: Peepal Press, 1998), p.80 [lines 2-5]. 162 cf. Samuel Durrant online article: “Hosting History: Wilson Harris‟s Sacramental Narratives”, pp.1-13. 163 June D. Bobb, Beating A Restless Drum: The Poetics of Kamau Brathwaithe and Derek Walcott (Trento,NJ & Asmara Eritrea: Africa World Press, Inc. 1998), pp.31-32. 164 Derek Walcott, “New World” in Collected Poems 1948-1984 (London , Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992), pp.300-301. 165 See, Yvette Christiansë, “Monstrous Prodigy: The Apocalyptic Landscapes of Derek Walcott‟s Poetry,” in Jamie S. Scott & Paul Simpson-Housley, Mapping the Sacred: Religion, Geography and Postcolonial Literatures (Amsterdam-Atlanta GA: Rodopi, 2001), pp.199-224. 166 José Luis Martínez-Dueñas Espejo & José María-Fernández, Approaches to the Poetics of Derek Walcott (Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2000), p.57. 167 “Heaven is a Green Place: Varieties of Spiritual Landscape in Caribbean Literature” in Jamie S. Scott & Paul Simpson-Housley, Mapping the Sacred: Religion, Geography and Postcolonial Literatures (Amsterdam-Atlanta GA: Rodopi, 2001), p.180. 168 George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin (England: Longman Group UK, Ltd., 1986). Lamming wrote: “The empire and the Garden. We are to speak of the same way. They belong to the same person. They both belong to God…We are still slaves to these two.” [p.63] 169 Renthy Keitzer, “Creation and Restoration: Three Biblical Reflections,” in Ecotheology: Voices from South and North, edited by David G. Hallman (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1994), p.57 [pp.52-64] 170 Rosemary R. Ruether, “Eco-feminism and Theology,” in Ecotheology (1994), p.204 [pp199-204] 171 Larry L Rasmussen, Earth Community, Earth Ethics (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1996), p.10. 172 Brueggemann, Texts under Negotiation ( Fortress Press, 1993), pp.19-20. The latter emphasis is mine. 173 See, Marion Grau, Of Divine Economy: Refinancing Redemption (New York, London: T&T Clark International, A Continuum Imprint, 2004).