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the blood from a rooster or a goat cannot change the seasons, alter the course of the clouds and fill them with water like bladders [...] I have learnt that what counts [...] is rebellion and the knowledge that man is the baker of life. (Jacques Roumain)1
Only justice can stop a curse. (Alice Walker)2
Damballah. Come from the earth. The sea. The sky. Damballah, speed to me from Guinea. Save all the lost sons, the daughters. Save us from this New World. (Jewell Parker Rhodes)3
God is all
we got
to gamble wit' (Edward Kamau Brathwaite)
THE ABOVE QUOTATIONS by four writers of the African diaspora outline the contradictions and complications of religion itself as a paradigm of survival and freedom in the wake of displacement, slavery, and continuing oppression. The four passages support a tension that exists among all colonized peoples concerning the role of art/culture in a culturally repressed political reality. The question addressed by the four writers is implied: "Can spirituality deliver us from colonialism?" and the echo of a further question, "Can spirituality be a basis on which we can heal and sustain a counter-colonial identity?"
A growing number of contemporary diasporic black writers have engaged these two questions, specifically responding to the black situation, by using Voodoo5 as a literary method for telling a black culture. This response to colonialism - the use of Voodoo as a trope - is part of the literary wing of the political strategies which similarly look to Voodoo as a means of defeating colonialism; a contingent of the black-feminist movement, and the ex-Haitian dictator Duvalier' s Tontons Macoutes are two vastly different examples of the use of Voodoo in a political project. The cultural anthropologist Serena Nanda calls the intertwining of spirituality and counter-colonial politics "revitalization movements"6 of the black diaspora, of which Rastafarianism and the Nation of Islam are the best-known examples. Unlike most colonized peoples, the diasporic black who wishes to salvage what remains of his/her culture encounters the unique problem of being doubly dispossessed: once displaced from the homeland itself (through slavery), and again displaced from social sovereignty in the New World (through the experience of being colonized). While most colonized peoples in the counter-colonial struggle seek their future in...