Political, Spiritual, Hermeneutical Revelation: An Essay on The Sacred Act of Reading
By Anwar Uhuru
Recently, I was asked what texts I would use if I taught Africana Philosophy and Religion. This question caught me in a bit of a paradox due to how African and African Diaspora Spiritual Traditions operate on a level of opacity. [1] It is meant to be this way to protect the spiritual and cultural integrity of these systems.
To know, is to seek out, sit beside, and ideally work with those who both practice and keep these libraries of knowledge within their minds while sharing it with those who they train. Of course, I prattled off a list of texts that are translated into English, but I also mentioned those scholars who write within their primary languages. In particular, I wanted to point attention to the necessity of written texts that have made an impression on my life. For me, that text is Anne M. Castro’s The Sacred Act of Reading: Spirituality, Performance and Power in Afro-Diasporic Literature.
[John Biggers, Band of Angels: Weaving the Seventh Word, 1992-3]
I begin my remarks on Castro’s book with her offer “to critically reflect on the truly spiritual life of power and the powerful life of spirituality” (ix). I use this quote because in the school of Western thought, Spirituality is a subject that is often deemed anti-intellectual. This is probably because many intellectuals see themselves as God. Anything beyond such gods would seem like a waste of time. However, for us mortals, reading texts can be a form of praxis that can and often does become a mystic experience. This can be seen in how Castro’s book asks for an act of reading that honors the work. It is important to note, that while her book does deal with spirituality outside of the Abrahamic tradition, the focus is always on spiritual traditions that allow past, present, or future events to be revealed to practitioners. Likewise, when reading texts, a past, a present, and a future is also revealed.
For instance, think of the contradictions of place and place-ness within the United States. Think of the notion of church and state being separate. There is no mention of spirit and spirituality in this formulation. If you are in the U.S., you reside in a country that literally puts the phrase “In God We Trust” on its currency. Its citizens swear to God when they pledge allegiance to their country’s flag and place their hand on a religious text while under oath—for both trials and to take the seat of political office. If one is to become naturalized as a citizen, one has to swear an oath whose last phrase commands “So help me God.” Yet, there is no mention of spirit. Perhaps such a mention would be too revolutionary. As Drucilla Cornell and Stephen D. Seely note in “Why Political? Why Spirituality? Why Now?”, spirituality “has long been the most powerful resource for surviving and struggling against the brutalities of colonialism and globalized racial capitalism for millions throughout the world” (26). For many of us, we were not meant to survive.
Yet, in the face of such absences regarding spirituality, Castro’s book, asks for the act of reading itself to be sacred. Reading must enact what she calls “performative textual hermeneutics” or what I call textual mysticism. [2] I would argue that we both ask for a reading of texts as not just a way of reading but a demand to read beyond the self. Whether it is interpreting interpretations or simply asking the question, “How do we read?” The intersection of spirituality, performance, and power in Afro-Diaspora Literature cannot be done using academic and formulaic methodologies that are white and western. It is as Castro states, “ethnicity and race are sometimes socially illegible” (ix). I will argue a step further to add that spirituality outside of a white western ethnic identity and racial origin is often socially and intellectually illegible and misread.
[Lauren Schatzman, Afrofuturism, 2023]
For the sake of brevity, I am going to focus my interest on Castro’s rumination of how spirituality is power or the power of spirituality. Currently, there is a surge of scholarship that is written in English that focuses on African Descended spirituality. For example, recent publications include Lindsey Stewart’s The Politics of Black Joy: Zora Neale Hurston and Neo-Abolitionism, Amanda Villepastour’s The Cuban Lexicon Lucumí and African Language Yorùbá: Musical and Historical Connections, The Lemonade Reader edited by Kinitra Brooks and Kameelah Martin, Omise’eke Tinsley’s Ezili's Mirrors: Imagining Black Queer Genders, and Kokovah Zauditu-Selassie’s African Spiritual Traditions in the Novels of Toni Morrison.
Arguably it is no easy task to write about African Spirituality due to the numerous variations in each system both because they are distinct from one another and because they are enmeshed in circuitous and convex intersections. That convex circulation is largely because these systems and their relationship to spirit are in communion with their places of origin—that being Africa but also the Western Hemisphere where Africans have germinated. Their germination being the affect and effect of the slave-trade and the long durée of colonization. In addition to that, the spiritual systems persistently insist on providing agency for their practitioners despite the conditions they may face. Hence, spiritual systems evolve to accommodate and make room for the various beings that practice and retain the cultural and spiritual knowledge of these systems.
The main component that informs African spirituality and its Diaspora is the call and response. The elements of this practice began with the drum, the vessel to call down God, and the response of that call in how spirit manifests itself. Yet, the Negro Act of 1740 removed drums and bells because their power became a catalyst for the Stono Rebellion. This power to call happens again once more in St. Domingue in 1791. Despite the hemispheric attempt to eradicate the drum or its call, the rhythm was absorbed with clapping, stomping, oral sounds that mimic the drum, the slapping of thighs and hitting sticks which become the clave, stringing beads on gourds to retain the shekere, as well as metal discs on a wooden ring which becomes the tambourine. Spirit could also manifest using a stick on a board which becomes the main percussion in a good ole Gullah-Geechee ring shout.
These instruments are conduits to call spirit. Likewise, the spoken words, present in the jeremiads of David Walker, Maria Stewart, or Baby Suggs Holy are also calls to the African spirit. Likewise, the akpon and the oro-seco during a drumming, or an individual or collective of practitioners chanting Oríkì to the point of trance. These practices allow spirit to manifest as a challenge. Castro raises this by stating that practices reveal “reality as integrative and fluid; thoroughly challenges formative Western philosophical tenant of self-knowledge and individualistic subjectivity” (67).
Castro’s book focuses on how interpreting interpretation is not just a mere act of correcting historical and contemporary mis-readings. Performative textual hermeneutics are acts of reading-in. She is reading in-spirit and reading out the erasure of spirit. For instance, her second chapter, “The Hermeneutics of Spirit Possession: Interpreting Mediums in Changó, The Biggest Badass and Louisiana,” focuses on how possession appears in the diaspora. She unpacks “the phrase mounting the horse,” which is when the spirit (or spirits) mount and possess the person who is called a horse. Therefore, spirit “rides the mount” into the realm when spirit materializes itself into flesh.
[Divination in the Ifá/Yoruba tradition]
Castro reads the text Changó to elucidate the importance of possession. She states, “Agne’s individualistic autonomy is rendered obsolete when she realizes that she cannot control the boundaries of her own body and mind” (79). The idea of possession or to be enraptured is against Cartesian mind/body dualism or the mind/body/spirit triad. Castro’s reading is asking to go against white western ideologies which separate the secular from the sacred.
Therefore, to be in possession, in trance, enraptured, and located/placed is to belong to and be indebted to a community. I argue that possession is a form of eros or a love higher than the self. It is a philosophical endeavor to be in the fullness of self and being with their community through a spiritual praxis. Castro notes, “to act as a medium between the metaphysical and physical worlds means abandoning these preconceived paradigms. It means submitting to the overwhelming power of the community song” (101).
The takeaway I get from Castro’s work is that the western project has eradicated a notion of community, belonging, and fullness because it has eliminated spirit and spirituality. In its place, it has promoted distance, the feeling of being in a silo, and fragmentation. But we do not need to follow such hollow readings. We can instead heed the call and response by reading in spirit and calling out practices of erasure, fragmentation, and illegibility.
Notes
[1] See Édouard Glissant. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1990.
[2] See Anwar Uhuru. “Textual Mysticism: Reading the Sublime in Philosophical Mysticism.” APA Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience 19-2 (2020): 3-5.
References
Castro, Anne M. The Sacred Act of Reading: Spirituality, Performance and Power in Afro-Diasporic Literature. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2020.
Cornell, Drucilla and Stephen D. Seely. “Why Political? Why Spirituality? Why Now?” The CLR James Journal 27 (2021): 25-38.
Dr. Anwar Uhuru is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Wayne State University. Their research interests include Black Existentialism, Africana Philosophy, Critical Race Theory, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Black Intellectual Thought. They have publications in the Journal of Hip Hop Studies, The APA Newsletter: Philosophy and the Black Experience, and Radical Philosophy Review. Their forthcoming book, The Insurrectionist Case for Reparations: Race, Value and Ethics, will be published through SUNY Press.