Transnationally Rooted Practices of Candomblé in Toni Morrison's Paradise

Abstract

Since the 1970s, a number of African American writers, including Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Danzy Senna, and Elizabeth Alexander, have developed literary works around Brazilian spiritual, cultural, and social formations. Advancing within a hemispheric context Houston Baker's concept of an “oceanic critical consciousness,” this article examines how narrative representations of Candomblé in Toni Morrison's Paradise (1997) prompt acts of self-reconstruction that penetrate the national borders framing certain notions of African American identity in the post-Civil Rights era. The author argues for greater recognition of the abiding yet often ambivalent transnationality of African American identity and its employment, particularly by women writers, in contemporary African American literature. The article suggests that African American literature and U.S. blackness in general must be resituated in global terms and that one way of doing so is through the figure of the woman spiritually reconstituted through transnationally rooted practice.

Keywords:

• African American literature
• black transnationalism
• black women's literature
• Brazil
• Candomblé
• diaspora
• Toni Morrison

Notes

Harryette Mullen, “African Signs and Spirit Writing,” Callaloo 19, no. 3 (1996): 673.

Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave & Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (New York: Random House, 2007), 76.

Ibid., 77.

Ibid., 78.

Ibid., 84.

While I focus here on Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), Valerie Babb offers a compelling transtextual analysis, reading across Douglass's 1845, 1855, and 1881 versions of his autobiography to show that Douglass gave “increasing attention to traditions ‘within the circle’ that validate the cultural legitimacy of his African American antecedents” (Valerie Babb, “‘The Joyous Circle’: The Vernacular Presence in Frederick Douglass's Narratives,” College English 67, no. 4 [2005]: 365). In an earlier reading of Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Robert S. Levine notes that Douglass “suggests in Bondage, more than in the Narrative, Sandy's possible influence over the outcome of Douglass's battle with Covey,” a revision that “encourages a reconsideration of Douglass's ties to [slave] … culture” (Robert S. Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997], 130, 131).

Houston A. Baker Jr., “The Point of Entanglement: Modernism, Diaspora, and Toni Morrison's Love,” Contemporary African American Literature: The Living Canon, ed. Lovalerie King and Shirley Moody-Turner (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 19.

Ordep Serra, “Historical Perspectives on Candomblé,” Lecture, Centro de Estudos dos Povos Afro-Índio- Americanos (CEPAIA), Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, January 12, 2004.

Ibid.

Rachel E. Harding, A Refuge in Thunder: Candomblé and Alternative Spaces of Blackness (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 48; Serra, “Historical Perspectives on Candomblé.”

Zita Nunes, Cannibal Democracy: Race and Representation in the Literature of the Americas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

Harding, A Refuge in Thunder, xvi.

Ibid., 71.

Ibid., 221, 119.

Ruth Landes, The City of Women (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), 143.

Ibid., 148.

Ibid., 142.

Toni Morrison, Paradise (New York: Random House 1997), 5.

This Brazilian history of persecution informs Paradise. “On a trip to Brazil in the 1980's, Ms. Morrison heard about a convent of black nuns who took in abandoned children and practiced candomble, an Afro-Brazilian religion; the local populace considered them an outrage, and they were murdered by a posse of men. ‘I've since learned it never happened,’ Ms. Morrison said. ‘But for me it was irrelevant. And it said much about institutional religion and uninstitutional religion, how close they are.’” Dinitia Smith, “Toni Morrison's Mix of Tragedy and Folklore: New Novel is Overtly Feminist Work,” New York Times, January 8, 1998, E3.

Morrison, Paradise, 8.

Ibid., 14, 169.

Ibid., 177.

Ibid., 18.

Ibid., 292.

The depictions of religious practices in Paradise are never overtly identified as Candomblé. Instead, the Candomblé moments exist only as glimpses, hints, echoes, invocations, and veiled reconfigurations. Candomblé is a syncretic Afro-Brazilian creation, and Morrison's imaginative depictions of rooted practices draw on a number of sources, Candomblé being one of the strongest.

Morrison, Paradise, 9.

See Jennifer Terry, “A New World Religion? Creolisation and Candomblé in Toni Morrison's Paradise,” Toni Morrison and the Bible: Contested Intertextualities, ed. Shirley A. Stave (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 192–214.

Ibid., 18.

Ibid., 311.

Harding, A Refuge in Thunder, 156.

Morrison, Paradise, 222.

Ibid., 262.

Ibid., 264. The Portuguese word “Piedade” means pity, compassion, and mercy, but it also conveys multiple other meanings. In Salvador da Bahia, the locus of Afro-Brazilian culture and history, “Piedade” is the name of a church, a square, and a thoroughfare, among other sites. Our Lady of Piedade is also associated with the orixá Yemanjá.

Ibid., 303.

Ibid., 265, 266.

Ibid., 283, emphasis mine.

Ibid., 303.

Ibid., 18.

Karla F. C. Holloway, Codes of Conduct: Race, Ethics, and the Color of Our Character (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 36.