locating Caribbean spirituality

(b) Recognizing the Spirit

Indigenous Spirituality and Caribbean
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Literature

Kei Miller

In the somewhat miraculous way that lecturers are able to say very small things that
open up much larger worlds for their students, a lecturer at the University of the West
Indies (Mona) once told her class, ‘there is something happening underneath the text’.
She was speaking in reference to Erna Brober’s novel, Myal (1988), and it seemed to
me then, as it seems to me now, that this is one of the more insightful things one could
say about that text. Yet, despite this insightfulness, it is one of those things we might
find difficult to expand upon; for how does one, in academic prose, venture into this
world of the spiritual – a world which, by its very nature, resists substantiation or defi-
nition? (Forbes 2007). After all, the biblical saying goes, those who worship the Spirit
must worship in Spirit; one is only supposed to perceive spiritual things with a spiritual
(rather than a cerebral) receptor. Such logic, however, limits the ways readers are able
to talk effectively and perceptively about texts like Myal set in Caribbean land- and
spirit-scapes.
In the academic discussion of metaphysical things, we are often tempted to tuck
‘the Spirit’ within quotation marks, a way to insert scepticism into the discourse; for
if we aren’t sceptical of the Spirit itself, we are at least sceptical of our own ability to
‘catch it’ and then pin it down for dissection. But capturing the Spirit is exactly the
task that several Caribbean writers seem to have set for themselves. To consider the
writing of Erna Brodber (1988, 1994), Earl Lovelace (1982), Jennifer Rahim (2009),
Pauline Melville (1998), Jacob Ross (2008), Tanya Shirley (2009), Kei Miller (2006,
2010) and Marlon James (2005, 2009) (to name only a few) is to come face to face
with novels, short-stories and poems in which the Spirit occupies a significant place
in both text and subtext.
Copyright 2011. Routledge.

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 INDIGENEITY: RECOGNIZING THE SPIRIT

Though I have been using the singular term, Spirit, I mean to include within this
multiple spirits and indeed multiple expressions of the spiritual. In a discussion of Toni
Morrison’s fiction, Jean Strouse once described a ‘world … filled with signs, visitations
[and] ways of knowing that [reach] beyond the five senses’ (1981: 51). Caribbean writ-
ers seem also to reach towards such a world, recognizing the spiritual lives that local
people lead, and encouraging readers to see these ways as noble rather than mired
in darkness or ‘evil’. Thus, in the title story of Olive Senior’s collection, Discerner of
Hearts (1995), Theresa grows up when she learns not to view the Revivalist healer, Mr
Burmham, as the ‘reprobate’ her father often teases him as being. When Cissy falls ill,
Theresa is able to accept her wisdom that ‘there is sick, and then again there is sick’
and understands that she is in need of more than a regular doctor. Similarly, in Junot
Diaz’s novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008), it is the all night prayer
vigil of La Inca and the community of women that saves Beli from an even worse
fate when she is set upon by ruffians sent by the dictator, Trujillo; ‘To exhaustion and
beyond, they prayed, to that glittering place where the flesh dies and is born again’
(2008: 145).
Caribbean writers have probably felt the need to offer such affirming examples of
local religious practice as a counter-discourse to colonial narratives that had previously
Light vs
painted them as primitive. For if in religious rhetoric there is the recurring notion of
Dark God and goodness being ‘light’, it is hardly surprising that when ‘the West’ (to use a
rather broad term) beheld other landscapes and did not see in them any gods or cer-
emonies that were familiar, then they inscribed their own positions in ‘the light’ by
conversely painting these new landscapes as places that were without it. If nothing
else, this provided a moral justification for Europe’s colonial enterprise. Rather than
extracting diamonds or gold or cinnamon, they were importing ‘light’ to people who
were trapped in darkness.
The Caribbean may not have been the original ‘heart of darkness’, but it became an
echo, a reflection of the shadows that Africa in particular was supposed to be mired
in. Indeed when the narrator of an Earl Lovelace novel describes Trinidad, he feels it
is within his permit to correct Conrad’s portrayal of Africa. The opening pages of the
novel Salt (1996) paint a picture of a Caribbean landscape many miles away from the
Congo, but still the narrator offers this rejoinder: ‘there was no inscrutable wilderness
here, no wild and passionate uproar to make people feel they is beast’ (Lovelace 1996:
5). Lovelace begins to shed light, as it were, unto the Caribbean because the old colo-
nial impression of the region being trapped in ‘darkness’ and its people being bestial,
had become unshakeable, even to the Caribbean’s own citizens.
This blindness, or perhaps more accurately this way of seeing things darkly, may
have its genealogy in Christopher Columbus’s own myopic view of the islands – his
inability to see what was in front of him. When writing back to the Catholic mon-
archs of Spain, Columbus noted, ‘nowhere in these islands have I seen signs of reli-
gious observance’ (Ife 1992: 29). Such myopia continues through the 400 years of
slavery. Lady Nugent, for instance, though celebrated as a more liberal member of the
ruling class, is equally unable to see religion or an enlightened ‘spirituality’ in the

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 KEI MILLER

folk. Writing in her journal, she observes, ‘generally speaking, I believe the slaves
Religious extremely well used. Yet it appears to me, there would be certainly no necessity for the
blindness
Slave Trade, if religion, decency and good order, were established among the negroes’
(Wright 2002). The eventual abolition of the slave trade and the emancipation of the
black population does not, of course, lead to an abolition of racist attitudes. Herbert G.
de Lisser, for instance, in an early twentieth-century Jamaica, writes autobiographically
about the moment he finds himself marching behind a group of Zion Revivalists. He is
a voyeur of their rituals and practices, but looks on with a combination of Columbus’s
and Lady Nugent’s limited visions. Though he is actually able to see ‘religious observ-
ance’ he is unable to see it as something positive unlike Theresa in Olive Senior’s story.
De Lisser’s account is a peculiar one, for it manages to capture the fiery aesthetics of
Revival while remaining unable to see beauty in what it describes. His interjections
range from the snide to the contemptuous. Observing a woman giving a testimony, he
says ‘[s]he could not have been more than twenty-five, but already she had developed
a cast of countenance that indicated both fanaticism and complete demoralization of
character’ (de Lisser 2008: 105). The captains of the band are ‘of a villainous appear-
ance’ and the followers are ‘debased, diseased, and unclean’. He further sees the rituals
of Revival as being mere ‘echoes’ – things that are not truly of themselves, but instead
only mimic other cultures, ‘Here then was clearly the survival of an African custom
masquerading as a native Christian revivalist demonstration’ and then again, ‘[t]he
idea of a sanctuary and an altar had evidently been borrowed by these people from the
Roman Catholics’ and perhaps most disturbingly he compares them to monkeys when
he writes, ‘they were endeavouring to ape the manner of a minister of the gospel’ (de
Lisser 2008: 104, 107).
Examples of these kinds – utterances that continually mark local and indigenous
expressions of the spiritual as inferior – can easily be pulled from almost any period
of life in the Caribbean, including the present. As recently as 2009, a Nine-Night
celebration held in honour of the recently departed playwright, Trevor Rhone, was
lambasted in local newspapers as being a ‘demonic practice’ (Cooke 2009). The dev-
astating earthquake that rocked Haiti in 2010 was written off in certain circles as not
merely an ‘Act of God’, but specifically the act of a vengeful god who was punishing
the natives because of their involvement in Vudoun (Voodoo) and pacts they may
have made with the devil. It is against this backdrop of perceptions (many of them
self-perceptions) that Caribbean literature has tried to insert its own affirming voice,
oftentimes as part of a greater nationalist project that tries to recognize local spirits and
put them in a good light.
I want to suggest three ways in which such a project of ‘recognizing the Spirit’ has
been carried out: first, there has been an effort to recognize Caribbean expressions of
spirituality and worship as something unique and at least equal to European expres-
sions; second, there has been an attempt to recognize the Spirit within spaces that
are traditionally considered ‘secular’; third, there has been an attempt to recognize
the Spirit within the mundane and everyday of Caribbean life. These strategies have
been deployed in a range of Caribbean literary genres. There is, however, one

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 INDIGENEITY: RECOGNIZING THE SPIRIT

problem that will haunt any discussion that tries to navigate its way through an ‘indig-
enously’ Caribbean spirit-scape; for just as the physical landscape has been a site of
multiple arrivals and migrations, so too has the spirit-scape seen its own share of move-
ment. Outside of the Native American deity, Huracan, few of the indigenous gods
of the region have survived, and even Huracan survives as an admittedly powerful
and terrifying being, but a force of the physical/meteorological world rather than the
Spirit world. There are religions that have sprung up from Caribbean soil as it were
– Rastafari, Vudoun, Spiritual Baptist, Santeria – but these are all syncretic religions
that borrow from sources outside the Caribbean (Chevannes 1995; Stewart 2005).
To speak then about the region’s Spirit life is to talk about ways and beliefs that have
been imported: Hinduism; Christianity; Islam. Even the spirits of folklore have flown
in: Lagahoo arrives in Trinidad with a new name, but seems to be descended from the
Werewolf; the name of the Eastern Caribbean’s vampire figure, Soucouyant, is obvi-
ously rooted in the French verb ‘to suck’; River Mumma comes to Jamaica via the Eng-
lish mermaid and the West African Mammy Wata; Rolling Calf comes from the Afri-
can cow god Gashanami; Coolie duppy seems to have floated in from Asia; and so on.
The Caribbean has enjoyed (to steal Pauline Melville’s title) a ‘Migration of Ghosts’
(1998). Despite this thriving metropolis of spirits, however, it has become too easy and
perhaps all too common to include only Afrocentric expressions of spirituality within
the category of the ‘indigenously Caribbean’; to cast Eurocentric expressions as impe-
rial and ‘foreign’; and sometimes to ignore Asian expressions altogether.

Earl Lovelace’s novel, The Wine of Astonishment (1982) is at pains to recognize a

Spiritual Baptist community as indeed Spiritual. The narrative chronicles the persecu-
tion faced by a group of Baptists during the prohibition years of 1917 to 1956. Diana
Paton’s essay ‘Obeah Acts: Producing and Policing the Boundaries of Religion in the
Caribbean’ paints a helpful backdrop. Paton points out that the Shouters Prohibition
Ordinance of Trinidad mirrored other laws that had been instituted throughout the
Caribbean. In St Vincent there was the Shakerism Prohibitions Order and in Jamaica
there was the long-established Obeah Act, still not repealed. Throughout Lovelace’s
novel he shows parallels between the Catholic church, which the society holds up as
a site of progress and upward mobility, and the Baptist church, which is degraded as a
Paralles
site of backwardness. Sometimes these parallels are subtle. On Sunday mornings the
between Catholic church rings its bells to summon its congregants to worship; in the Baptist
Christianity church the ringing of the bell is seen perhaps as a crashing cymbal, a bizarre and
+ Baptist
backward custom. In the Catholic church the language of Latin, hardly understood by
faith
any of the congregants, is valorized, whereas the incomprehensible spirit language of
Mother Raymond and Sister Lucas is disdained. To paraphrase Brathwaite, the Baptist
expressions of worship are seen as inferior because the people who practise the religion
are seen as inferior (1984: 7). Lovelace does not, however, leave his message open for
subtle interpretation. He is explicit in his mockery of characters like Ivan Morton
who turn to the Catholic church, encouraging Bee, ‘[w]e can’t change our colour, but
we can change our attitude … we can’t be white, but we can act white’, to which Bee

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 KEI MILLER

thinks, ‘[a]ll I want is to worship God in my way’ (1982: 13). But Bee’s own way is not
at all valorized. Eva, the narrator, and a Spiritual Baptist herself, does not pretend that
her church is as architecturally impressive or decorative as the Catholic Church, but
still she holds it up as something of comparative value. It was ‘a simple hut with no
steeple or cross or acolytes or white priests or Latin ceremonies. But is our own. Black
people own it. Government ain’t spend one cent helping us build it or put in bench in
it or anything; the bell that we ring when we call to the Spirit is our money that pay
for it’ (1982: 32).
Lovelace celebrates the determination of the Spiritual Baptists to worship in their
‘own way’ – indigenously as it were. If he could, de Lisser may point out that there are
obvious instances of borrowing in the rituals of the Baptists, but the congregants see
these ways as their own. The Spirit language which they speak is their own creation,
comes from their own mouths, rather than being copied out of a book published in and
disseminated from a colonial centre. Unlike the ridiculous Ivan Morton who tries to
encourage the village to ‘act like white people’, Lovelace celebrates those who decide
to act like themselves.
A similar tension is explored in Brodber’s Myal (1988). William Brassington, the
Anglican pastor of Grovetown, would have his congregants give up their head-dresses
and their habit of walking barefoot. His wife Maydene, who is far more sensitive to the
local environment, chastises him: ‘You are a thief … William, you are a spirit thief.
You keep taking away these people’s spirit’ (1988: 18). For Maydene to accuse her
husband of spirit thievery means she has of course recognized the people’s spirits and
indeed the entire indigenous spiritual landscape of Grove Town. Brodber is encourag-
ing and guiding the reader to do the same. And not only does Maydene recognize the
Spirit, but she sees it as something beautiful, and eventually becomes a part of that
landscape. The novel seems to celebrate Maydene for her ‘effort to be true to any place
or situation that she found herself in’ (15) as opposed to William who believed that
‘the nature of [his] kind of ministry was to exorcise and replace’ (18). What is being
exorcised are local ways of being (the headdresses and the barefeet), replaced by hats
and shoes – things that don’t quite fit.
It is of course not so difficult to recognize the Spirit in spaces that themselves claim
to be spiritual, such as the Spiritual Baptists or the Spirit community of Grove Town,
but it seems that the particular project in books such as Myal and the Wine of Aston-
ishment is not only to acknowledge the people’s Spirit, but to recognize it as good.
However, arguably the most magical moment in Wine comes, not in the very affecting
scene in the middle of the novel when Bee breaks the law and the Spirit descends on
the Church, but rather at the very end when Eva and Bee are able to recognize the
Spirit in a place they would not expect to find it.

I listening to the music; for the music that those boys playing on the steelband
have in it the same Spirit that we miss in our church: the same Spirit; and
listening to them, my heart swell and it is like resurrection morning. I watch
Bee, Bee watch me. I don’t say nothing to him and he don’t say nothing to

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 INDIGENEITY: RECOGNIZING THE SPIRIT

me, the both of us bow, nod, as if, yes, God is great, and like if we passing in
front of something holy.
(Lovelace 1982: 146)

Short-story writers, in particular, seem drawn to this strategy of recognizing the Spirit
in unspiritual places, and this is what happens in the title story of Hazel Campbell’s
collection, Singerman (1991). The Christian citizens of the fictional nation, I-land, are
preparing for the arrival of a famous American televangelist. This evangelist, Blister,
becomes emblematic of a kind of spirituality that has had a tremendous impact on the
Caribbean, is indeed embraced by many, but is not seen as truly indigenous. Camp-
bell is perhaps suggesting that there is so much friction between Blister’s practice of
religion and local ways of being, that it causes something of a blister on the culture
in much the way that Brassington’s proposed shoes would cause blisters on the people
of Grove Town. The local Christian organizers decide it makes sense to invite Blister
to come right after the carnival season of ‘letgo-ism and revelry’ (1991: 13). His visit
then is to become a way of sanctifying I-land after its own people have polluted and
defiled it. He must bring the Spirit with him from abroad to do a ministry, again simi-
lar to William Brassington’s, of exorcizing and replacing. Blister with his ‘foreign’ but
spiritual gospel is a foil for Singerman with his indigenous but supposedly unspiritual
calypso. It is in the moment when these two characters meet, in the middle of Blister’s
crusade, that the inhabitants of I-land are able to see on stage, quite literally, their own
indigenous ways and to finally recognize the Spirit inside. Blister is trying to preach,
but Singerman’s calypso is suddenly ‘preaching louder’ (19).

Everybody looking round. But is not radio or anything, is real, real sound, beat
strong and clear, instrumentals selecting good good, and is now it sounding
like hymn.
(19)

Blister wants to exorcise this local spirit from his stage but cannot.

Blister gesturing for security that not noticin him. The locals want to hear
from Singer. The foreigners fraid the locals. In any case, what could they do?
Drag Singer off stage before the whole o his people? Is riot they want to hap-
pen or what?
(20)

By making Singerman’s calypso an appropriate hymn to be sung at the crusade,

Campbell allows us to see what Kwame Dawes might call an example of ‘natural mys-
ticism’ – the ability of art to, at once, be politically engaged, sound a lament for the
desperate situations that Caribbean subjects often live in, and transcend this secu-
lar reality to move towards a spiritual place of celebration (1999). Perhaps the most
admirable, if not also the most effortful, aspect of Campbell’s depiction of the Spirit

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 KEI MILLER

is its inclusiveness, for Singerman is never racially identified and his song eventually
includes several influences. ‘Everybody hummin or singin. Brass band improvising.
Rasta and Indian drum makin up message’ (Campbell 1992: 21). And in response to
the many local people who would step back from this display of their own Spirit, Sing-
erman gently admonishes, ‘[d]on’t fight it, man, use it. Is we thing this, man’ (20).
In Dionne Brand’s short story ‘Blossom, Priestess of Oya, Goddess of Winds, Storms,
and Waterfalls’, the power of an indigenously Caribbean Spirit to rise up and counter-
act the blistering effect of a foreign culture is seen in a somewhat different situation.
This time it is the Caribbean subject, Blossom, who has migrated to a foreign land.
After years of living in Canada, ‘just getting older and older, and watching white
people live’ (1989: 37). Blossom slips into depression. In the chronicling of her life
in Canada, we find that there were moments when she was possessed by the Spirit in
order to survive a particularly trying moment. In particular, when she is almost raped
by her employer, a doctor, she is able to resist him in a way that frightens even him.

It ain’t have cuss, Blossom ain’t cuss that day … A craziness fly up in Blossom
head and she start to go mad on them in the house. She flinging things left
right and centre and cussing big word. Blossom fly right off the handle, until
they send for the police.
(33)

Not even the police are able to control Blossom and she carries on with her rampage,
managing to extract her full-pay from her terrified employers. This colourful behaviour
might be recognized (in some circles, even shamefully) as ‘Caribbean’ but it certainly
isn’t recognized as being spiritual, not even by Blossom. It isn’t until she has a more
complete breakdown years after and is rescued again by this very spirit, that Blossom
is finally able to recognize it, to locate its origin, and to name it. ‘This Oya was a big
spirit Blossom know from home’ (39).

it was Oya who plague the doctor and laugh and drink afterwards. It was Oya
who well up the tears inside Blossom and who spit the bread out of Blossom
mouth. Quite here, Oya did search for Blossom. Quite here, she find she.
(41)

Now fully possessed by Oya, Blossom begins to prosper in a cold and unfriendly land-
scape. She opens a rum-shop that caters to the large migrant population, but from
the opening of the story we are told that people do not just come to Blossom’s for the
cheap liquor; instead, ‘[i]t was the feel of the place’ (31). The immigrants are able to
see beyond what would usually be considered a secular and unspiritual space, and rec-
ognize instead a kind of sanctuary in which they can connect to the Spirit.
Caribbean poets have also participated in this project of acknowledging previously
unrecognized spirits. However, it seems their particular strategy has been to recog-
nize the Spirit in the everyday – even in the mundane aspects of life. Women poets

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 INDIGENEITY: RECOGNIZING THE SPIRIT

especially have often been able to re-imagine the domestic space as a place of ceremo-
nies, rituals and even worship. Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze encourages her ‘sisters’ to take time
out from their chores and celebrate a random ‘holy day’ in which they can tell the
laundry to ‘wait’.

… leave
the dirty dishes
use the one clean champagne glass
for a drink of water
(1992: 1)

In this toast, Breeze performs something similar to the popular biblical miracle; not
literally transforming water to wine, but by placing it in a champagne glass she makes
it echo that transubstantiation. The everyday act of drinking water then becomes a
sort of communion in which women are invited, not to celebrate the body of Christ,
but rather their own bodies and lives.
Poets like Jennifer Rahim from Trinidad, Grace Nichols from Guyana or Merle
Collins from Grenada have also been able to transform the mundane lives of women
into something magical and celebratory. But perhaps it is the poet Lorna Goodison
who becomes the best example of this attempt to recognize the Spirit in the everyday.
The very titles of some of Goodison’s poems announce this project. In ‘From the Book
of Local Miracles, Largely Unrecorded’ the poet documents one day in the life of her
mother’s friends.

Write this truth now

of the simple faith
of my mother’s friend.
(2000: 72)

The story is told of a woman who begins cooking before having all her ingredients. In
the conscious writing of this tale, it is transformed from a mere incident or anecdote
into a kind of scripture, held up as a proverb. In ‘The Domestic Science of Sunday
Dinner’ Goodison is again able to see holiness in her father’s act of cutting open a
coconut.

My father pauses to pour the water

into a long stemmed wine glass
and lifts it like a chalice to my mother’s lips.

Then he turns from this tender holy

and gallant gesture and splits open
the head of the coconut with the hammer.
(87)

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 KEI MILLER

Of course the coconut is symbolic in some of the region’s folk religions for its three eyes
issue a reminder of that world beyond the five senses (Stewart 2005). But Goodison
here is simply recording the very simple and physically grounded ritual of a man and
seeing in it something holy. She recognizes the Spirit.
One of Goodison’s most moving tributes is to Miss Mirry, the ‘ill-tempered domestic
helper who hated me’ (2000: 89). In her occupation as domestic worker Miss Mirry
existed on one of the lower rungs of Jamaica’s social hierarchy. Still, Goodison insists
that recognition is due to her. Miss Mirry is portrayed as another example of someone
who has been blistered by the imposition of a culture she cannot fully adopt. Her
tongue cannot comfortably accommodate an imposed colonial language, and she com-
municates more fully in her own indigenous ways:

In her anger she stabbed at English, walked it out,

abandoned it in favor of a long kiss teeth,

a furious fanning of her shift tail, a series of hawks

at the back of her throat, a long extended elastic sigh,
a severing cut eye, or a melancholy wordless moaning
(90)

Miss Mirry thus has ‘becom[e] her true self’ (90), a self that Goodison recognizes as
spiritual. Though common perception would have understood her language as coarse
or even vulgar, Goodison hears in it a kind of music that has healing properties:

She was speak-singing in language

familiar to her tongue, which rose unfettered
up and down in tumbling cadences
(90)

Before the poem Miss Mirry was trapped in the ‘parallel universe’ of ‘Ullava’ (89),
perhaps symbolic of the dark places where many Caribbean citizens continue to live
their largely unrecognized spiritual lives. Goodison, like many other writers from the
region, attempts to take her subjects out of this darkness, to recognize the Spirit that
has occupied these dark spaces and that also lurks underneath several texts, and she
celebrates it.

References
Brand, Dionne (1989) San Souci and Other Stories, Canada: William Wallace Publishers.
Brathwaite, E.K. (1984) History of the Voice, London: New Beacon.
Breeze, Jean ‘Binta’ ([1992] 1998) Spring Cleaning, London: Virago.
Brodber, Erna (1988) Myal, London: New Beacon Books.
—— (1994) Louisiana, London: New Beacon Books.
Campbell, Hazel (1992) Singerman, Leeds: Peepal Tree Press.

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 INDIGENEITY: RECOGNIZING THE SPIRIT

Chevannes, Barry (1995) Rastafari, Roots and Ideology, Barbados: University of the West Indies
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Cooke, Lloyd (2009) ‘Demonic Spirit Worship for Rhone?’ Jamaica Gleaner, September 29. Avail-
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Goodison, Lorna (2000) Guinea Woman: New & Selected Poems, Manchester: Carcanet.
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James, Marlon (2005) John Crow’s Devil, New York: Akashic Books.
—— (2009) The Book of Night Women, New York: Riverhead Books.
Lovelace, Earl (1982) The Wine of Astonishment, London: Heinemann.
—— (1996) Salt, London: Faber & Faber.
Melville, Pauline (1998) Migration of Ghosts, London: Bloomsbury.
Miller, Kei (2006) Kingdom of Empty Bellies, Coventry, UK: Heaventree Press.
—— (2010) The Last Warner Woman, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Paton, Diana (2009) ‘Obeah Acts: Producing and Policing the Boundaries of Religion in the Carib-
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Senior, Olive (1995) Discerner of Hearts and Other Stories, Canada: McClelland & Stewart.
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