Jake Colavolpe
Professor Wai Chee Dimock
American Literature in the World
27 April 2015
Cultural Considerations in Hybrid Religions
For as long as cultures have existed, religions have existed alongside them. As
the world has grown more international, undoubtedly, these cultures have come in
contact with one another. Because of this globalization, religions have come in
contact as well. The fusion of culture is likely and accepted, but the fusion of religion
is much more complex. By bringing into conversation Dreaming in Cuban by
Christina Garcia and The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, we are able to
formulate a greater understanding of the ways hybrid religions interact on both
religious and cultural fonts. Both novels bring Christianity (dominant in the western,
American canon) into relation with two distinct African religions – Kilanga and
Yoruba. However, the interactions that Christianity has with Santeria and local
Kilangan are quite different.
In Kilanga, we see a push against the mission trip of the Prices. Their religion
is deemed incompatible with the Baptist thought of Nathan Price, in contrast to the
previous mission of Brother Fowles, who ultimately marries a native woman and
assimilates into Kilangan culture. Here, we see rigidity in the Christian framework
that is in competition to the local religion. The Prices and their Christian
philosophies come to compete with Kilangan culture. In contrast, Santeria practiced
in the book Dreaming in Cuban has a fairly different interaction with Christianity – in
particular, sainthood. Patron saints become intertwined with Yoruba religion,
brought to the Caribbean by the long gone slave trade. Here, a Western religion is
not posed in contrast to an African one, but instead as symbiotic. The religions fuse
to create a practice that is both Western and non-Western. Religious culture is not
lost on the island of Cuba, but redrafted. However, neither of the two religions
engaged these novels faces seamless, unproblematic transitions in the process of
hybridization.
In Dreaming in Cuban, our first interaction with religious hybridization
comes quite early in the novel. Garcia brings us our first taste of Santeria within the
first few pages. Felicia arrives at a scene foreign to most readers, red handkerchiefs
tied around a tree at a specific distance from the base, paired with the decapitated
head of a rooster attached to a knot, the inside adorned with onyx and mollusk
shells, her vision obscured by incense and hundreds of burning candles (Garcia 13).
The scene appears occultist to the Western eye; incredibly un-Christian. But behind
this spectacle rests a statue of Santa Barbara, Saint Lazarus, and other Christian
patron saints. These characters go by names both Christian and Yoruban, having
various purposes in either nomenclature. This is Santeria.
Santeria is the product of West African (Yoruban) religion brought to the
Caribbean through the Spanish Empire’s hand in transatlantic slavery, intertwined
with indigenous rituals. While the relationship appears seamless – symbiotic, even –
there are still aspects of Santeria that Garcia reveals to caveat the idea of perfection
in this hybrid religion. She makes this divisiveness evident to the reader
immediately. In the initial scene, there is division between the practitioners of the
death-parting ritual. Felicia – a Cuban Latina, the mulattos – mixed raced ritualists,
and the Yoruban overseer. Even with Ellegua (or Saint Michael or Saint Anthony),
the god of the crossroads uniting these cultures, their relationship is incredibly
complex. Garcia writes on the passive glances of the Yoruban, overseeing the
operation as if above them (15). This tension is not palpable – the folks involved are
not pushing back on the beliefs one another, and thus avoid creating a religious
practice that promotes dominance over any culture. Yet, the scene is made
complicated by both race and culture. A perceived religious symbiosis in the novel
lies on the thin line of cultural competition. Garcia presents us with this religious
and cultural matrix that is crucial to understanding Christian relations with ‘local’
customs and faith.
Throughout the novel, the idea of Santeria high priest or priestess is seen as
an important part of Cuban identity. It is not seen as a concept that is exclusively
African, indigenous, or Spanish, as it is carved out in the intersection of culture and
religion. These priests are visited for physical health issues (such as Celia’s breast
cancer (Garcia 160)), death (as seen with Felicia’s first visit), and other woes both
personal and spiritual.. The Santero accurately predicted Celia’s breast cancer that
would later lead to the medical removal of her breast (Garcia 161). Santeria is
nonexclusive from Cuban culture, and as far as Cuban cultural philosophy is
concerned, Santeria provides faith, but also answers both medical and personal that
are culturally accepted. There are Cubans of all religious backgrounds in the novel,
and each of these folks have cultural connection to Santeria. There is no stalwart
between these religions, as there is no severe competition between the cultures that
may accompany them. Celia is identified as an atheist (Garcia 175), and there are
mentions of Christianity throughout the book. But Santeria is connected to the all of
the lives we encounter in Dreaming in Cuban. Santeria is both a cultural and
religious phenomenon. It is in this way that it proves a perfect case for understand
this faith/culture matrix, and how critical it is to hybridization.
However, the intersection of faith and culture is not hidden within the novel.
Garcia does not suggest that Santeria is an idyllic religion, peacefully weaving
together histories, ethnicities, and practices. While the religion itself is not a site of
pure contention, significant strains in culture become evident in Dreaming of Cuban,
particularly in its discussion of Cubans in America.
Pilar adopts Santerian practices after passing by a botanica on her way home,
and we see for the first time a functional ‘American’ in contact with
Western/Caribbean/African tradition. While Pilar was born and raised in Cuba, she
adopts American identity and culture. Thus, this experience is foreign to her. She
comments on the contrast of “plastic plug-in Virgins with sixty watt bulbs” and
“dried snakeskins and ouanga bags” (Garcia 199). It is foreign for a nonreligious
person like herself, but not because faith-driven Santeria practices (in which she
later indulges) but instead with cultural aspects. For Pilar it is the cultural baggage
that comes with Santeria with which it is hard to adapt.
Perhaps metaphorically, she is impeded on her return home from purchasing
Santeria ritual materials. She faces violence in Morningside Park, showing the
difficulty in successful hybridization in unaligned cultures, in this case, American
and Cuban. Snatched from her are the herbs that she just purchased. She is then
sexually assaulted while the “children” taking turns groping her breasts smoke the
her ritual plants (Garcia 202-3). In this moment she is alienated form her American
culture – latches onto her Cuban culture, and therein finds solace in Santeria. It is
here that Garcia reveals to us the ways in which religion and culture can war in
matrix, but can also be the gateway to the hybridization that we see in the novel.
However the intersections of culture, race, and religion do not always fuse
(perhaps problematically) in the way Santeria does in Dreaming in Cuban. In The
Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, we are told a story from the perspectives
of a missionary’s children. These children uniquely understand the world around
them, and profoundly recount on the hardship of their fathers mission within the
Congo.
From the beginning of Kingsolver’s novel, we get a sense of the tribulations
that lie ahead. Above the innocence of bringing along frivolities of American life –
Betty Crocker mix packets, other novel foodstuffs – comes a stronger mission. The
Prices have taken the journey to the Congo for the purpose of religious conversion.
Their community in Georgia is religiously homogenous, and the mission
spearheaded by Nathan Price has the ultimate goal of trying to replicate this with
the Kilanga. He is keenly aware of various differences in culture, and these divisions
become more visible as his mission progresses.
His first experience is received quite poorly. His recitation of Chapter 19 of
Gensis (Kingsolver 26-8) as recalled by Rachel shows the Kilanga’s immediate
interest in the fiery rhetoric of Nathan Price, but his quick turn towards demonizing
nudity through making a spectacle of a naked woman and her child turns the village
sour. Rachel remarks, “I wept for the sins of all who had brought my family to this
dread dark shore” (Kingsolver 29). She distinctly believes that the sins committed
by the Kilanga mean that God must come (along with the Prices) to triumph over the
local hedonism. From the initiation of the mission, it is not about fluidity and
adaptation; it is about overruling local customs and instating a new doctrine. This,
as one might suppose, comes with resistance from local peoples, who are
immediately put off by the way in which Nathan Price calls them out to be sinners.
For Price, these folks are destined to hell lest they live culturally, not spiritually, by
the Bible.
He begins by planting a ‘demonstration garden’ meant to exhibit important
tenets of his Baptist faith. He toils away in this garden, planting it flat and as one
would on Georgian soil. However, this proves to be an impractical Christian
tradition on Congolese lands. Without permission, but with the growth of the garden
in mind, a local named Mama Tataba radically upheaves the garden landscape to
allow for proper drainage in the Congolese rains (Kingsolver 39-42). Price takes this
as a direct competition to the Christian ideals he is trying to promote. Garcia writes,
“when [Nathan Price] says anything at all, even a simple thing about a car or a
plumbing repair, it tends to come out this – in terms that can be interpreted as
sacred” (Kingsolver 40). However, this is a clash of culture, not faith. The practical
way of going about things as to actually maximize a harvest is to plant in the Kilanga
way. But for Price, culture (the way in which he tills his garden) is intrinsically
related to the religion that he follows. It is truth that religions are tied to the
cultures they come from, and thus it is hard to avoid clash in cultural practice for the
sake of religious practice. For the Prices, religion has become the vector through
which these cultural clashes are explained. The stalwart between Christianity and
folk religion comes not from a lack of integration between the two religions but
instead the ways in which Christianity is inextricably linked to Western culture. This
is similar to the clashes of culture we see in Dreaming in Cuban. Christianity is
impeded by not by its religious merit, but its cultural relation.
Through these texts, it appears to be cultural competition that serves as the
explanation for why it is incredibly hard for the Christian mission of the Prices to
truly manifest. Unlike Cuban culture inherently amalgamate due to historical
movements of peoples – consensual or not; through colonial settlements in the
Caribbean and slavery – Kilanga culture is exclusively Kilangan. Price does not bring
along with him an exclusively Christian framework, but instead the Bible paired
with Georgian Baptist culture. The people of Kilanga do wait for God to come, and
humor many of Nathan Prices’ Christian rituals. Cultures simply clashed too much,
and there was no more time to wait on God. There is no way to foster a religious
change, which may presuppose culture, without both being flexible. Price does not
wield the type of power to forcibly change neither culture nor religion, as was the
case for the creation of Santeria. Santeria arose form the forced cohabitation and
family making in the Caribbean, creating massive cultural shifts and thus loosening
religious frameworks. Price’s mission cannot create the cultural shifts he needs to
lay the foundation for neither pure Christianity nor a hybrid Christian/Kilangan
philosophy.
From this we are able to understand culture as an essential part of religious
hybridization. If religion and culture are too tightly linked, the pair will compete
when in contact with differing religion and culture. On Congolese land, it was the
Price’s American culture that lost to the physical ecosystem of the Kilangan
rainforest and the ideologies of the Kilanga peoples. If religion and culture are
unaligned, many times through racial mixing (i.e., mulattos discussed in Dreaming in
Cuban), the two may flow into one another, adopting practices from this identity
delta.
And thus after a mission of misfortune trying to implement both culture and
religion, Nathan Price dies in the Congo, unsuccessful in promoting Christianity
among the Kilanga. Christian God is dead, losing in competition to local religion.
Price’s death is symbolic of this larger loss. God and Price die unsuccessful in their
attempt to alter the beliefs of the local people. The rigidity we see in the Price
mission appears contrasted with the cultural flux of Christianity we see in Dreaming
of Cuban. However what is uniquely different about the ‘symbiosis’ in Santeria is the
way in which is portrayed as transitive. Santeria traditions are always in flux – the
religion can be practiced by Santeros and Santeras or by Pilar in her New York City
apartment. But something is uniquely different about the Price mission.
Unrecognized by the Prices, their religious mission carried cultural ideologies. The
countless interactions with the Kilanga always clash in cultural contention. Through
the cultural rigidity in The Poisonwood Bible we see the ways in which a religion’s
relationship with its adjoining culture radically affects how a religion adapts.
Kingsolver writing as an elder Leah Ngemba (neé Price) captures the
intersection of culture and religion in hybridization quite perfectly. She writes,
“[My griefs] are white, no doubt, and American. I hold on to Ruth May while
he and the rest of the Congo secretly hold a national day of mourning for lost
Independence. I can recall, years ago, watching Rachel cry real tears over a
burn hole in her green dress while, just outside our door, completely naked
children withered from the holes burning in their empty stomachs…” (430).
As Leah as aged and watched her sister die in the Congo, her perspective around the
stark differences in their cultures are revealed. How is a religion to take hold when
priorities around holes in dresses are to align with starvation? Nathan Price is still
committed to his religious work while Leah has married and assimilated into
Kilangan culture. She now lives in Kilangan, not Georgian, and without her father’s
God (Kingsolver 435). Her place in the religion/culture matrix that assists in
proving the idea that culture has a crucial part in understanding religious hybrids.
It is not explicit whether or not Leah’s abandoned her Christian faith as a product of
adopting and assimilating into Kilangan culture, however there appears to be an
implicit statement that there is causation.
For both novels, negotiations between Christianity and localized religions
both face a similar outcome. Jesus; God; one deity; the central ideal behind Christian
thought, loses out. With Santeria, there are a plethora of important deities, adopting
the faces and nomenclature of Christian Saints – there is no one deity. For the
Kilanga, there are simply more facets of Christianity that are incapable of
adaptation. The unifying experience of hybridization in these novels, if nothing else,
is that Jesus loses by a large margin. However, this does not just reflect a ‘loss’ for
Christianity in the process. This reflects instead on how both culture and religion
shift…???
Because of this, there is ultimately no true symbiotic relationship, as hybrid
religions are intrinsically complex. These religions draw on competing philosophies
between competing cultures. For Dreaming in Cuban, this means that Santeria
operates as a functional religion appearing to be symbiotic, but it evokes stress in
culture (Pre-revolution Cuban/Revolution Cuban/American) and stress in religion
(Yoruban/Christian/Indigenous). For The Poisonwood Bible this means that the
Christianity of the Price mission cannot advance due to the competition it faces in
Kilanga, derived from both cultural and environmental factors. These two novels
show us the difficult process of religious hybridization, and that even functioning
hybrids still war within themselves. Garcia’s piece gives us insight into the ways in
which culture is a crucial part of the religious hybridization, ultimately showing us
why the Price mission was so unsuccessful. Culture and physical space in the Congo
were incompatible with the Georgia-American culture the Prices brought with them,
but surely not Christianity itself. In the same light, Santeria was crafted at the
intersection of races and cultures, and its practice struggles when not at this
intersection. Garcia and Kingsolver provoke thought about what it means to exist in
these competitive religious – and thus cultural – locations remarking that
competition can sometimes mean success, but other times complete failure in the
attempt to unify religious thought.
Works Cited
Kingsolver, Barbara. The Poisonwood Bible. NY: Harper Collins, 1998. Print.
Garcia, Cristina. Dreaming in Cuban. New York: Knopf, 1992. Print.