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Re-Configuring Paternal Legacies Through Ritualistic Art: Daughters and Fathers in Contemporary Fiction by Women of African Descent

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Re-Configuring Paternal Legacies Through Ritualistic Art: Daughters and Fathers in Contemporary Fiction by Women of African Descent RE-CONFIGURING PATERNAL LEGACIES THROUGH RITUALISTIC ART: DAUGHTERS AND FATHERS IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION BY WOMEN OF AFRICAN DESCENT A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY BARBARA GINA PIERRE-LOUIS IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY FERNANDO ARENAS, TIMOTHY A. BRENNAN JUNE 2012 © Barbara Gina Pierre-Louis 2012 i Acknowledgements I am eternally grateful to the community of people that made it possible for me to complete this project. I would like to especially thank my Beau, my parents, Flis and Malcolm, Vav, T-Ger, Ze, UncaGee, Dodi, Coyou, Ken, Manmi Françoise, Bosny and Marjo, Dina and Naomie, UuncaKarl, Nine, Neinei and other extended family members throughout the dyaspora. Mwen‘pab ka bliye—I will always remember the kindness of Solange St. Jean, Max Homidas, Ruth Anne Olson, Carmelle and Mardochard Louis, Robin Trana, Gaylene Seibold, Amy Lee-Jones, Jeannie Shinozuka, Heather and Wes Lauer, Julie Smalley and John MacHalec, Beth and John Megas, Emmanuel Jean, Leah and Will Nicholson, Kathy and Wayne Bogen, Datra and Dev Oliver, Jolanna Norton, Nathalie Gaillot, Resty Namata, Kristin Beamish-Brown, Megan Corbin, Pamela Flash, Mitch Ogden, Beth Weixel, Rebecca Ulland, Malcolm McNee, Josh Gardner, Jermaine Singleton, Vanessa Abanu, Rose Brewer, Walter Jacobs, John Wright, Yuichiro Onishi, Ilene D. Alexander, April Knutson, Adrienne Todd, Monica Kenton, Frances Matos- Schultz, Susan McMillen Villar, Thomas McCallum, Emilce Lopez, Ulrika Speckman, Cecily Brown, Meridith Cody, Leslie Morris, Zenzele Isoke, Fernando Arenas, Timothy A. Brennan, Ana Paula Ferreira, Njeri R. Githire, and Joanna O’Connell. I have been blessed immensely by your unfailing support throughout the years… Axé! ii Dedication To God and God Alone…This dissertation is dedicated to my Guardian Angels on this scholastic journey, Dr. Kirsten Jamsen and Ms. Tabitha St. Cyr. With the completion of this dissertation, I honor you. iii Abstract In “Re-Configuring Paternal Legacies through Ritualistic Art: Daughters and Fathers in Contemporary Fiction by Women of African Descent,” I analyze three contemporary novels by Black women authors to argue that their daughter-protagonists gain a sense of their own subjectivities as women of African descent through their imaginative and creative responses to their own muted paternal histories and legacies. These responses motivate the creation of ritualistic art forms rooted in communal practices such as storytelling, sculpting, music, dance-drama, folk medicine, and traditional cuisine. In this dissertation, I use theoretical formulations developed in disciplines such as literary studies, gender studies, Brazilian regionalist studies, and African diaspora studies. These interdisciplinary approaches have allowed me to map the centrality of family, community, rituals, and art to the development of female subjectivity as represented in Marilene Felinto’s As mulheres de Tijucopapo/The Women of Tijucopapo, Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker, and Gayl Jones’s Corregidora. I define ritualistic art as any folk art form that individuals employ to achieve healing and transcendence, liberate muted histories, honor their spatial environments, and re- integrate themselves into their communities. I explore father-daughter relationships as connections that are held together by participation in ritualistic art forms that honors folk wisdom, storytelling, and vernacular utterances that are invoked through dreams, mythology, and archetypal figures of the African diaspora. Throughout the dissertation, I consider how generations of survivors, generations of families work through issues of grief, forgiveness, and the need to iv remember, the need to retell buried histories. I engage with these ideas within the context of the cultural productions of female artists, writers, and knowledge creators and their relationships to the legacies of their fathers. The concepts of paternal loss and paternal yearning in their various forms take a center stage in the art created by these daughter-protagonists. In the three texts examined, ritualistic art is described as practices that are multivocal, both here and there, multi-local, and multi-temporal— spanning time and space, bending and transfiguring the boundaries between the physical and the metaphysical. It is through the practice of ritualistic art that the community becomes accessible to the Afro-diasporic daughters featured in this dissertation. My point of entry into an analysis of these three texts is based on a reassessment of the muted histories of fathers who contribute significantly to female subjectivity, yet have been traditionally relegated to the margins of gender studies and other types of social research. Even today, too many members of the African diaspora are forced to experience fatherhood through absence and loss. Millions of men of African descent are violently ripped from their families as a result of state sponsored violence, war- making, criminalization, and the combined hardship of racism poverty. When black fathers are present daughters are often at a loss. Women are forced to reconcile personal, social, and political histories, with our desire, myth and longing for a “father figure.” My work privileges texts that depict daughter-protagonists as artists who use their imagination to summon their paternal legacies. In doing so, these texts also connect literary, aural, visual art forms and the ways folk artistic expressions inspire contemporary Afro-diasporic women artists to re-articulate, reinforce, and at times v transgress social conventions. vi Table of Contents Acknowledgements Dedication Abstract Introduction Demystifying Paternal Legacies in Contemporary Afro-Diasporic Fiction 1 Chapter 1 “Negative Confessions” of the Father: Un-Masking the Mysterious Ways of the Loas 40 Chapter 2 Liberating the “Pages of Hysteria”: Daughters, Healing, and Ritualistic Art 86 Chapter 3 Configuring an Ecological Self through Northeastern Brazilian Myth and Paternal Memory 133 Conclusion From Literary to Visual Articulations: The Ritualistic Art of Rosana Paulino and Kara Walker 192 Work Cited 217 1 INTRODUCTION Demystifying Paternal Legacies in Contemporary Afro-Diasporic Fiction In her work on the social significance of absent fathers, Jean Reynolds asserts that “to know one’s father, in a sense, is to know oneself.”1 My dissertation examines notions related to fathers as symbolic figures, but most importantly, it looks at how fathers in the flesh and blood impact the formation of Afro-diasporic female subjectivities. Fathers, more so than mothers, have often been associated with the notions of absence, indifference, and even violence in the family sphere. Maternity is rarely questioned (as is paternity) and, in many societies, mothers are expected to be present. It is not necessarily so for fathers. Within a variety of contexts in the African diaspora, the problem of paternal absence has been exacerbated by geopolitical forces such as wars, colonialism, slavery, and forced migration. Fathers have often been excused from fulfilling their paternal duties so that they may participate in wars or explore new territories. What does it mean for black female subjectivities when fathers are absent (literally or figuratively) or are made to disappear by geopolitical forces such as African slavery in the Americas or migration to multi-cultural industrial centers? How will their daughters use such paternal legacies to grapple with a sense of self and how they want to exist in the world? Loss and disorientation become part of the configuration of black female identities, expressions of self, and the chronicling of alternate family histories. 1 Jean Reynolds, “Pygmalion’s” Word Play: The Postmodern Shaw (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999). 2 Over the last decade or so, understanding, critiquing, and reclaiming real-life fathers have become increasingly important themes both in the popular press and in academic scholarship. The high volume of self-help books, intended for adult daughters seeking a keener understanding of their relationship with their fathers, is illustrative of a growing interest in understanding this social connection. Feminist literary criticism about daughters and their fathers, while currently scarce, is gradually beginning to engage this topic. However, it remains difficult to find scholarship that moves beyond a focus on metaphorical fathers, who are typically made to represent patriarchy broadly rather than patriarchs, individually. In particular, there is a need to look more closely at father-daughter dynamics in literature. Gisela Moffit, author of a book on daughters and fathers in German literature, is convinced that while much research on the family has been conducted in recent years, “daughters and fathers have been [treated like] the step-children of Western empirical research and scholarship.”2 This can be easily confirmed and applied to scholarship published in African diaspora studies, African American literary criticism, black feminist thought, and black cultural studies. Criticism on well-known, Afro-diasporic novels such as Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), Audre Lorde’s Zami (1982), Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy (1990), and Maryse Condé’s Desirada (1998), has not yet provided an in-depth analysis of fathers of African descent or what the implications of their presence, absence, absent-presence, or present-absence could signify for the daughter-protagonists.3
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