When God Lost Her Tongue

Historical Consciousness and the Black Feminist Imagination

Janell Hobson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367198343
• eBook ISBN: 9780429516702
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

When God Lost Her Tongue explores historical consciousness as captured through the Black feminist imagination that re-centers the perspectives of Black women in the African Diaspora, and revisits how Black women's transatlantic histories are re-imagined and politicized in our contemporary moment.

Connecting select historical case studies – from the Caribbean, the African continent, North America, and Europe – while also examining the retelling of these histories in the work of present-day writers and artists, Janell Hobson utilizes a Black feminist lens to rescue the narratives of African-descended women, which have been marginalized, erased, forgotten, and/or mis-remembered. African goddesses crossing the Atlantic with captive Africans. Women leaders igniting the Haitian Revolution. Unnamed Black women in European paintings. African women on different sides of the "door of no return" during the era of the transatlantic slave trade. Even ubiquitous "Black queens" heralded and signified in a Beyoncé music video or a Janelle Monáe lyric. And then there are those whose names we will never forget, like the iconic Harriet Tubman.

This critical interdisciplinary intervention will be key reading for students and researchers studying African American women, Black feminisms, feminist methodologies, Africana studies, and women and gender studies.

1

A meditation on Black feminist divinity

DOI: 10.4324/9780429243554-3

In the beginning there were no words.

In the beginning was the sound, and they all knew what that sound sounded like.

– Toni Morrison, Beloved

Invocation

They saw God in the blackness of night. They had called her name, and she answered from the woods circling their ceremony to validate their quest for freedom. So, the story is told. So, the story is recalled. With variations, depending on the storyteller. A gathering of enslaved Black people who went to the woods to worship deliberately.

Like so many other enslaved communities forming “hush arbors” – much like the “Clearing” in Toni Morrison’s Beloved¹ – these devotees created a space of resistance. Such space was needed to invoke their gods from the African motherland without intrusion from their white enslavers. This particular gathering, however, was a bit different. Not because it included women leaders – a common occurrence among such communities throughout the African Diaspora² – but because they ignited a revolution that changed the course of world history. It is no small feat that, in such a shattering event, a Black feminine deity would lead the way, one who – when tracing her elaborate genealogy – has a complex history and iconography.

This is the legend of Caiman Woods, or Bwa Kayiman (Bois Caiman), where bondspeople on the island of Saint-Domingue – before it became Haiti (or Ayiti), the first free Black republic in the world – participated in a Vodou worship ceremony; one of the leaders included a mambo (priestess) sometimes identified as Cecile Fatiman, who sacrificed a black boar before the present company and gave some of the blood from the animal sacrifice to rebel leader and oungan (priest) Boukman Dutty to drink. The presence of the black boar indicates that the lwa they had summoned was Ezili Dantor, a love goddess and protector of mothers, women, children, and queer folk. As Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat once described of Ezili/Erzulie: “She was the healer of all women and the desire of all men.”³ She is also the mother of Haiti. According to local history, Ezili possessed the mambo Fatiman and, through her, called on her devotees to rise up against their enslavers and seize their freedom through bloodshed. So began the Haitian Revolution on August 14, 1791.

Reclamation

Official histories are inclined to cast doubt on such stories. After all, the uprising was demonized, the way the French told it, with its inversion of the Catholic Holy Eucharist, an outright “parody” as religious scholar Elizabeth Pérez calls it.⁴ Think of the oppositional consciousness: a priestess with the same authority as a priest – the latter belonging to the exclusive order of male-only members who may be ordained by God, according to the apostle Paul; the blood from a non-kosher pig – at least from a Jewish context – instead of the sanctified blood of Christ; and violent insurrection that reversed the order of slave-master relations. Certainly, no doctrine of “slave, obey your master!”

In accord with Vodou praxis, the black boar – a symbol of Ezili Dantor – “would have become pork,” Pérez insists. “Women would have cooked it, after seeing to its meticulous washing, skinning, and butchering” (334). These are the sacred rites dismissed from official histories, dismissed perhaps because Black women were in charge. No recording of their standards of cleanliness when instead bloody rituals raise the specter of sullied blackness.

Because the tale is documented differently – orally from Haitian culture, exaggerated written tales from white imperialist French culture – somewhere lies the truth of the past. Subsequently, Bois Caiman is often written “outside of history,” the way Hegel had written off the African continent.⁵ Situated in its Caribbean geography, rife with colonial violence and revolutionary zeal, the events of the Haitian Revolution are severed from the same radical impulse of the American and French Revolutions. As Sibylle Fischer notes:

In the letters and reports of white settlers, the [Haitian] revolution is not a political and diplomatic issue; it is a matter of body counts, rape, material destruction, and infinite bloodshed. It is barbarism and unspeakable violence, outside the realm of civilization and beyond human language. It is an excessive event, and as such, it remained for the most part confined to the margins of history: to rumors, oral histories, confidential letters, and secret trials.⁶

It is precisely in its confinement to the margins of history that a project of reclamation is imperative here, sifting through the silence where “there were no words” and retrieving the sounds of history echoed through ritual ceremonies, performativity, orality, and insurrection. Such sounds are muted by what Michel-Rolph Trouillot notes as “the silencing of the revolution [which] was strengthened by the fate of Haiti itself. Ostracized for the better part of the nineteenth century, the country deteriorated both economically and politically – in part as a result of this ostracism … The revolution that was unthinkable became a non-event.”⁷ However, Marlene Daut complicates this silence, given the proliferation of literature across the transatlantic world exploring the Haitian Revolution during and after this period, thus revealing that “these events were perhaps less ‘silenced’ in literal terms than they were incessantly narrated in a particularly ‘racialized’ way that had the ultimate effect of subordinating the position of the Haitian Revolution to the French and American revolutions.”⁸

In responding to this racialized discourse, how do we then reclaim a muted history? When contemplating anti-colonial and/or postcolonial projects, Stuart Hall rightly asks, “Is it only a matter of unearthing that which the colonial experience buried and overlaid, bringing to light the hidden communities it suppressed? Or is a quite different practice entailed – not the rediscovery but the production of identity? Not an identity grounded in the archaeology, but in the retelling of the past?”⁹ What, in the retelling, might we produce with regard to an identity based in anti-colonialism, Black feminism, and diasporic consciousness?

How does historical consciousness challenge or reinforce white imperialist and patriarchal power embedded in this retelling? After all, the retelling of Bois Caiman, as Joan (Colin) Dayan argues, has become central to Haitians who “continue to construct their identity not only by turning to the revolution of 1791 but by seeking its origins in a [ceremony] quite possibly imagined by those who disdain it.”¹⁰ The story of Bois Caiman may have derived from the colonial fever dream of white settlers, but its rituals of desire resonate for those who are oppressed. In connecting Bois Caiman to other religious gatherings throughout the Diaspora – including the eighteenth-century creation of Nannytown, named for rebel leader Nanny, by the Windward Maroons in Jamaica and the nineteenth-century ceremonies led by Vodou priestess Marie Laveau on Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana – Kameelah Martin reminds us that, historically, “the wilderness – the bayou, the swamp, the bush – has served as the breeding ground for African religious syncretization.”¹¹ In the retelling of history, marginalized people engage in their own history remix, in which radical possibilities emerge concerning freedom and its links to nature, a Black feminine divine, and Black women’s leadership.

Often history derives its power from whether it is perceived as “truth” versus a “lie,” depending on the storyteller. Signifying on the work of anthropologist foremother Zora Neale Hurston who collected “big old lies” in Eatonville, Florida, Trinh T. Minh-ha reminds us that men and colonial powers often “appropriate women’s power of ‘making material’ to themselves and, not infrequently, corrupt it out of ignorance. The story becomes just a story. It becomes a good or bad lie. And in the more ‘civilized’ contexts … women are replaced and excluded from magico-religious functions.”¹²

Black magic women who invoke gods and conjure art are often excluded from the annals of history and relegated to the realm of superstition. How else do we undermine their oppositional discourse? What is that hard line drawn between history’s realities and falsehoods? The goal of this chapter is not to blur that line but, rather, to trace that line cautiously and surreptitiously in a bid to determine how historical consciousness can politically and culturally awaken those in present and future generations.

The goal is also to reclaim a historical presence, where only gaps and silence prevail, or what Myriam Chancy calls a cultural lacuna when examining Haitian women’s literature, by which she refers to “the absence that completes the whole.”¹³ Such silences give way to the imagination, fueled by the sacred. In this regard, Tinsley invokes Ezili as “the lwa who exemplifies imagination” (2011, 424). Specifically, Ezili and her impact on the Haitian Revolution can be reclaimed for the Black feminist imagination.

In Pedagogies of Crossing, Alexander calls for a transnational feminism that fully integrates the Black feminist imagination – specifically with regard to the sacred – if we are to include a wide array of women, especially those in the African Diaspora, who have not eschewed their complex cosmologies. Indeed, this oppositional worldview survived our enslaved ancestors’ traumatic experience of the Middle Passage, the main conceptual metaphor of “crossing” that Alexander engages in her critique. Vodou, which when translated means “spirit,” is one manifestation of these ancestors’ cosmology with its complex system of material and spiritual planes, the latter inhabited by lwas, our ancestors, and a supreme deity. And yet, as Alexander notes, “African-based cosmological systems become subordinated to the European cosmos … If Africa functions largely as an epistemic gap … then its cosmological systems cannot be made to figure legitimately in (post)modernity’s consciousness and, therefore, cannot be availed to assist in understanding the constitution and formation of self” (297). It is within an African context that Vodou cosmologies – where we find our powerful lwa Ezili – are constituted and, subsequently, rendered incompatible with a modern feminism invested in a secular worldview. However, what if an effective transnational feminism, one rooted in the Black feminist imagination, were to redefine these parameters? After all, as Gina Athena Ulysse argues, Vodou is often derided in Western discourse (especially from Christian perspectives) and, therefore, must be defended from what she calls “epistemic violence” stemming from “racialized discourses … that continually demean blackness and its myriad manifestations in order to extol the sanctity of whiteness.”¹⁴

When Haiti and its revolution...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Reprints
• Frontispiece
• Introduction
• Prelude
• 1 A meditation on Black feminist divinity
• 2 Reframing portraits of Black womanhood
• 3 Revolving doors of no return
• 4 Cultural currency and the value of Harriet Tubman
• 5 To play the queen, to embody the goddess
• Postlude
• Epilogue
• Notes
• References
• Acknowledgments
• Index