The Feminine and the Sacred

Catherine Clément, Julia Kristeva, Jane Marie Todd

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• ISBN:
  9780231507950
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Deconstruction in Philosophy

In November 1996, Catherine Clément and Julia Kristeva began a correspondence exploring the subject of the sacred. In this collection of those letters Catherine Clément approaches the topic from an anthropologist's point of view while Julia Kristeva responds from a psychoanalytic perspective. Their correspondence leads them to a controversial and fundamental question: is there anything sacred that can at the same time be considered strictly feminine?

The two voices of the book work in tandem, fleshing out ideas and blending together into a melody of experience. The result is a dialogue that delves into the mysteries of belief -- the relationship between faith and sexuality, the body and the senses -- which, Clément and Kristeva argue, women feel with special intensity.

Although their discourse is not necessarily about theology, the authors consider the role of women and femininity in the religions of the world, from Christianity and Judaism to Confucianism and African animism. They are the first to admit that what they have undertaken is "as impossible to accomplish as it is fascinating." Nevertheless, their wide-ranging and exhilarating dialogue succeeds in raising questions that are perhaps more important to ask than to answer.

Dakar

NOVEMBER 7, 1996

Dear Julia,

EVER SINCE YOU told me about the strange link between women and the sacred, I run into it at every turn, right here in Africa. Nothing surprising about that, you’ll say, on the “dark continent” to which Freud compared femininity in general. But let me describe to you what I saw yesterday, since, as surprises go, it was really something …

There was a Catholic pilgrimage in honor of the black Virgin of a large town called Popenguine, about twenty miles from Dakar. Imagine a huge crowd on a raised strip of ground, barely shaded by a few spindly trees, facing a platform where the bishops of Senegal are celebrating a solemn mass together, under the authority of the cardinal of Dakar. It’s noon, the sun is at its zenith, 104 degrees in the shade, indigo sky. We dignitaries are sheltered next to the altar. By my rough estimate, there are at least eighty thousand men, women, and children in the congregation.

The mass begins. All of a sudden, there’s a shrieking from the crowd—a woman’s voice. The medics rush in immediately, stretcher in hand, discover the source of the voice, firmly strap down the woman who’s screaming, and disappear. “A nervous attack,” I tell myself. But it happens all over again ten minutes later. And for the two hours of the ceremony, at regular intervals, there’d be a woman’s screams, medics, stretcher, evacuation. Again and again. A strange, sacred phenomenon was breaking out at a religious ceremony. Is the mass sacred? No doubt. Nothing is lacking, not chasubles, or censers, or church choir. Why, then, do I have the impression that the screams of these women were introducing a form of the sacred that is different from that of a Catholic mass?

Nevertheless, the first aid workers knew the drill. They were obviously used to these screaming women, whom you could still hear in the distance, like a plaintive opera chorus; they were strapped down but they didn’t stop screaming, one after the other, in canon. What exactly were they saying in the middle of the mass? What were these bound women expressing with their screaming?

The word came to me: trance. All the fallen screamers were black. In the assembly, I noticed many white-skinned nuns, who did not budge. But the African nuns did not budge either. The “stricken” ones were young African laywomen, often with children at their sides. No men, not even an adolescent boy. The cries were absolutely identical: same tessitura, same modulations. But what stunned me most was what the African man beside me—buttoned up tight in his suit and tie, a dignitary, since he was there with me—whispered in my ear.

“Hysterical fits,” he declared. “It’s not uncommon.”

Damn, and I hadn’t even asked him anything! So here was a member of the African elite giving the name hysteria to what I called a trance. He was thinking like a toubab, a word used to designate the white man in Africa. Perhaps because he was speaking to a European, he put himself in the skin of a black toubab, that is, a Westernized African. (Thus, in Senegal, some of President Senghor’s adversaries called him the “black Toubab.”) And that too is not uncommon in Africa, especially when the receiver of the message belongs to the nation that colonized the country. What name to choose? Trance or hysteria? After all, the word trance is no less Western than the other.… He’s upset me, that man standing next to me. Now I’m completely lost.

The women are black and Catholic, they throw fits during a solemn mass in the sun. They were born on the coast of West Africa, the place where the first Portuguese colonizers and the first Muslim preachers arrived at the same time, in the fifteenth century. The introduction of Islam and African Catholicism dates from that era. But since Senegal is now 90 percent Muslim, Catholicism represents only a tiny portion of the population: the women who cried out belong to a religious minority. And what about animism from before the fifteenth century? Quite simply, it has remained everywhere.

All the monotheistic religions introduced into Africa have kept their animist past almost intact. Muslims worship both Allah and their spiritual leader, whether caliph or marabout; they invoke genies by chanting “Bismillah”; initiates are sprinkled with blood after a Christian baptism. None of that bothers anyone, and the jinns get along quite well with the one and only god. But, for the piercing cries stirred up by a mass, the word uttered by the officials refers to a Western pathology! Hysteria, don’t you see, just like in Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century.… It seems clear to me that this is an ancient phenomenon, rebaptized in the language of the toubabs; and, in a country where the elites speak French perfectly, they can’t possibly be unfamiliar with the word trance to designate such attacks. No, it’s something else that my dignitary friend was expressing: denial, embarrassment. Hysteria would seem to be less disturbing than the trance, that great secret of Africa.

In Senegal, it’s difficult to analyze what exactly connects these trances to animism, which has been repressed since the fifteenth century. The Serer in the coastal regions knew Marranos, Portuguese Jews, and Protestants; then Catholicism glazed everything over with a deep faith, but with hybrid modes of expression. Under the glaze, the African trance emerges. The trance, African? What am I saying? The trance is universal: it is found everywhere in the world! And yet, I cannot let go of the idea: African trance. Probably because I imagine a particular porousness in black women, I think I can make out a fulminating access to the sacred, similar to that of their African-Brazilian cousins during the candomblé ceremonies in Bahia: their bodies are totally uninhibited, their eyes rolled back, and, as in Popenguine, they have shaking fits.

Yet, once you get past appearances, it’s a very different thing in Brazil. The trances of the candomblé are anticipated, expected. Under the influence of African gods duly named by the saints’ calendar—Shango, Saint Jerome; Yemanja, the Virgin Mary; Ogun, Saint Antony—the possessed are guided by the “Father,” the officiating voodoo priest. In Brazil, because of slavery, African rites have once more assumed the upper hand and the women in trances do little screaming, or it’s the normal state of affairs. Here, in Popenguine, they are not “guided,” they are strapped down. Those who break loose must be put in chains, whereas, in the candomblé, the “breaking loose” is contained in advance. A strange reversal of the chains of slavery.… In Bahia, the bond between the “Father” and the possessed is purely spiritual; in Popenguine, the bonds between the clergy and the screaming women are material, they’re straps. Over there, in Bahia, Catholicism has bowed under the weight of Africa in exile; here, in Popenguine it doesn’t quite know what to do with this sacred disorder from the past mounting a resistance on native soil. For lack of anything better, first aid workers limit the damage. With straps.

Let’s move on. When I was living in India, I did not see any sacred disorder in the religious practices of middle-class Indian women, thoroughly “bound” by a century of British Puritan occupation, and also by their caste of origin. In the high castes of the Hindu social system, in fact, the body’s porousness is not part of the code of good manners. Letting oneself go is out of the question. But, having seen the mass pilgrimages of Indian peasant women, who also break loose, I suspect that the trance and its porousness probably have something to do with the caste of origin. The caste of origin? Careful … Let’s take a closer look.

A caste is a kind of file drawer into which the newborn individual is classified at birth and from which it cannot escape. The caste has nothing to do with “social class,” that’s certain. But it maintains a very close relationship with the old Marxist concept of “class origin,” that mental file drawer that determines the drives and thoughts from birth. For Marx, you can obviously change your social class, but you cannot rid yourself of your “class origin” any more than, according to Sigmund Freud, you can rid yourself of the unconscious. That being the case, the “caste” of origin plays the same role as the return of the repressed: the slightest opening and it comes out. Impossible to get rid of it. A little emotion and it reappears. It takes a very disciplined setting to be able to contain the return of your origins.… That’s why, in India, the high castes, bound by the strict manners of Hinduism, are capable of resisting the trance; and that’s why, in Popenguine, the African nuns, “bound” by the training of their order, did not yield to it, any more than the wives of the dignitaries on the podium. The women who screamed were Serer women, villagers or servants.

They are minorities and servants, and they fall into a trance. Well, no need to go to Africa to observe that phenomenon. I remember seeing, in Paris in the 1960s, a true “hysterical” fit at Sainte-Anne Hospital, unintentionally set off by Dr. André Green, chief physician at the time. That day, the young woman, who was from Brittany, pulled out all the stops: a stunning feat of hysterical acrobatics, perfectly executed, her head and feet holding up her stiff body, curved into an arc, her mind gone, her eyes far away, without a care, uninhibited. The good doctor’s comment: “You don’t see this archaic phenomenon anymore, except in illiterate Breton women when they come to town via the Gare Montparnasse.” There was no need to explain why illiterate Breton women were arriving in Paris: it was well known at the time that they came to be “placed” as domestic servants.

In the nineteenth century, during Charcot’s and Freud’s time, middle-class European women still had acrobatics in their hysterical repertoire. Partly because of education, the opisthotonos—that’s the scientific term for the arced figure—retreated to the countryside; it has probably disappeared by now. But, in the 1960s, illiterate Breton women still possessed that archaic art of the acrobatic trance: the culture shock of the city made them lose consciousness and caused that brutal somatization. Such was precisely the case of that young woman in 1964. But we were at the psychiatric hospital, where the sacred has no place. When she came to, the Breton woman was said to have had a hysterical fit, and neither she nor the doctors knew exactly what to do about it. In psychiatry, no one knows how to deal with a “secular” trance; and, since the sacred is not among the classifications, it is declared an opisthotonos. That’s a technical term, and a bluff. A lot of good it did her, that Breton women arriving at the Gare Montparnasse. Elsewhere, she might have used her gift for the trance to religious ends; perhaps she might have attained the status of a visionary. But she was a patient in the emergency ward of a psychiatric hospital in Paris. There you have it.

To tell the truth, I’m more certain about class origins than about the porousness of the body, your field. Not that I’m all that knowledgeable about social class! But through travels and extended stays all over the world, everywhere I have seen women in the grip of the sacred. The fact is, I’ve rarely seen it when they knew how to read and write, except as a kind of trendiness, like the European women so taken with the primal scream American style. Even today, in Senegal, women rarely venture far from the traditional family, and national education is deteriorating. Is it for that reason that Senegalese women display a kind of “porousness”? In this country, which has become largely illiterate, majestic African women saunter through the streets with an ostentatiously sexual gait, their boubous slipping off their shoulders. The porousness of these six-foot-four-inch goddesses literally leaves something to be desired.

That is not really the case for my screamers in Popenguine. There is nothing majestic about them; on the contrary, their appearance is insignificant. I told you they were villagers or servants. That’s not insignificant. In Africa, what is so easily called an “ethnic group” also depends on the caste system—very concealed but still extremely present—as well as on social roles. Serer women from the Popenguine region are often placed as “maids” in the capital, in middle-class homes in the big city. In Dakar, a “maid” (sic)¹ is Serer, just as a maid was Breton in Paris in the early part of this century. There is even a union of Serer maids. In plain language, they are some of the most exploited women in the Senegal metropolis.

From that I infer, perhaps a bit hastily, that they achieve a trance state more easily than their mistresses. Yes, I think that the capacity to accede violently to the sacred truly depends on one’s minority status or on economic exploitation. “Id”² must find an out somewhere, and, in the absence of education, that place of expulsion is the sacred. Or crime. Or both—that’s been known to happen. Do you remember the violent fit observed in Le Mans in the 1930s, when the two Papin sisters, excellent servants, fine in every respect, knocked off their employers, a mother and a daughter, one stormy night? They dismembered them in a raptus, or, in other words, in a trance. They were exhausted after the crime and showed no remorse, like the murderous heroines of Greek tragedy overcome by passion. Supposedly, as they carefully cleaned their carving knives, they simply said, “What a fine mess this is.” The Papin sisters were also good maids.

But, after all, to be a “good maid” in other people’s homes gives rise to revolt, and the trance is one form of that. There’s good reason to turn nasty when you’re enslaved. There’s good reason to take advantage of a mass to scream at the top of your lungs if you’re a peasant or servant woman, a Catholic and a Serer in Senegal. You don’t belong to the Muslim majority, you’re not one of the powerful. And then, too, you’re not the sex that rules the nation. In short, you’re right to rebel, and the setting of a solemn mass does the trick. Through the sacredness of a monotheistic rite, another form of the sacred, the ancient form, slips in. Choirs, incense, gold on the chasubles, glitter, the sun at its zenith, a little black Virgin placed at the base of the altar, and, all of a sudden, the breach … It’s come out. Who will stand in its way? Not the straps or the clergy. The cry is irresistible, and that’s what it’s made for.

Let me propose a first pathway to you, one effaced by the centuries. The sacred among women may express an instantaneous revolt that passes through the body and cries out. Now it’s your turn to shed some light on porousness.

Catherine

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Paris

DECEMBER 1, 1996

Dear Catherine,

YOUR LETTER WAS waiting for me in Paris for over two weeks, while I was rediscovering the hustle and bustle, and the brutality, of New York. I always have trouble landing in France, the unpleasantness of the time change is combined with the increasingly painful impression that the French are sulking: sulking over history, which, to be sure, is no bed of roses, but which is actually unfolding elsewhere.… In fact, what remains of a nation in the “United States of the World”? That’s an extremely grave question, but it is not the subject of our correspondence .…

You mention the black women who scream in a crowd of eighty thousand people in Senegal, around a statue of the Virgin; joyful libertines transformed by screams into possessed women; the porousness of their bodies; the efficient indifference of the nuns and medics, who are blasé about that ostentatious sensuality transformed into a hysterical fit, and the “psychiatric” diagnosis of a distinguished Senegalese.

As for me, I still have a vision of American “Africanness” before me. With every trip, New York seems more black and more ethnically mixed. But, curiously, it’s the female bodies—often so heavy and awkward—that give that mutant humanity its most reassuring—appeased, even—aspect of indelible serenity. They are not in a trance at all, these black ladies who manage the store racks, the department offices of universities, the branch offices of banks, and even, sometimes, the panels at symposiums and other televised or cultural events. Whereas their husbands and sons always seem about to get worked up, when they do not openly manifest their violence in the guise of personal or political demands—and we both know there is plenty to be done in America, especially when you are black—these dark matrons display professional competence and unfailingly solid nerves. That has nothing to do with the feverish agitation of emancipated women who, even a few years ago, believed they were liberating themselves by becoming more like men. The ones I saw this time behave like ordinary mothers, and proud to be so, women who quite simply speak up, and, just as simply, conduct the affairs of the city. Whether it is professionalism or indifference, they indicate to us that they have the time—that they have their whole lives ahead of them.

That is another dimension of the sacred: self-assurance here and now, which comes from the assurance that one has time. Not the fear of castration, in which man dresses up his fear of death, to the point of making the latter the sleepless lookout and ultimate support of the sacred; not the catastrophe of mourning, which women know in the flesh and which makes them eternal hired mourners, with or without dead bodies—I’ll tell you another time about the sources of that uncontrollable female melancholia. No. That attitude, so serene that one hesitates to link it to the sacred—the word sacred has a melodramatic or “hysterical” resonance, as the learned man standing next to you on the platform of dignitaries would say—is rooted in a certainty about life. There is life and women can give it: we can give it. Hence time is transformed into an eternity of miraculous instants. ...