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