Dissembling Bodily and Literary Wholeness: Centering the Spirit in Disability Studies through Black Women’s Writing

Abstract

In this article, I analyze Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day and Erna Brodber’s Myal in order to demonstrate that African-derived spiritual systems are central in Black women’s fictional depictions and theorizing of healing and disability. I argue that the violence of what Moya Bailey terms misogynoir is writ on Black women’s body, mind, and spirit—the latter of which is absent in disability studies frameworks yet central to healing and liberation in this literature. These writings present a syncretized spirituality drawn from African Diasporic, African Indigenous, and Indigenous American religious beliefs that have a more capacious understanding of wholeness and wellness to reimagine healing in ways that make space for a diversity of bodymindspirits. Black spiritual practice enables self-love and acceptance of disabled Black womanhood, and the Word, Nommo, bestows spiritual healing power.

1. Introduction

Akasha Gloria Hull opens Soul Talk: The New Spirituality of African American Woman (Hull 2001) with “A new spirituality has arisen among African American women” (p. 1). Hull goes on to explain, “enhanced creativity, especially as represented by the outburst of literature by Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, Lucille Clifton, Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, Paule Marshall, Sonia Sanchez, Gayle Jones, Tina McElroy Ansa, Phyllis Alesia Perry, Sandra Jackson Opoku, and others—literature that foregrounds supernatural material, viscerally impacting an unprecedented number of readers” (Hull 2001, pp. 1–2). Hull goes on to argue and emphasize that Black women’s spirituality is also deeply political. Spirituality, particularly spiritual practices rooted in African-derived religions, is important not only to these writers’ creative processes but also to their personal and political lives. They took seriously the world of the spirit and the efficacy of spiritual tools. Spiritual tools, in these women’s writings, are often represented as healing resources. Misogynoir, a term Moya Bailey and Trudy (2018), coined to name Black women’s specific experience of the collusion of racism and sexism, has deteriorated Black women’s physical, mental, and spiritual health. As Hull contends: “What I call circumstances include our being women, being black women, being poor women, and/or being sexually abused women. Together and singly these could be regarded as hardships and disabilities…. Appearances and stereotypes notwithstanding, African American women have been not simply victims or even survivors, but redeemers” (Hull 2001, p. 143). Hulls’s assertion here is truly insightful in relation to what I discuss in this paper. One, Hull gestures toward how misogynoir debilitates Black women. Navigating racism and sexism has been linked to higher incidents of heart disease, depression, high blood pressure, anxiety, and cancer, among other disabling illnesses, in Black women. While Hull uses “disability” as a metaphor to describe the challenges of being multiply marginalized, or as what Sami Schalk (2013) and others (May and Ferri 2005) call an ableist metaphor, it does invite us to consider the actually disabling effects of misogynoir on the bodymindspirits of Black women. Moreover, Hulls’s argument gestures toward the role and work of spiritual healing for Black women: Black spiritual practice allows Black women to define, for themselves, their feelings and relationship to their altered bodymindspirits. Rather than languish in self-pity over the loss of able-embodiment, spiritual tools allow them to “transform” these disabled “identities into beauty and power” (Hull 2001, p. 143). Healing, for Black women, does not have the relationship to cure that many in the field of critical disability studies have argued exists.

Disability studies scholars and activists have been wary of or have rejected the language of healing. For them, it is synonymous with the medical model of disability’s emphasis on cure. The medical model of disability assumes that disability is an individual, biomedical condition of the body that should be cured with pharmaceutical and/or medical technological interventions. Within the paradigm of the medical model of disability, being disabled is always tragic and never social or political. For good reason, disabled people have pushed back against this model to demonstrate that disability is much more determined by environmental and attitudinal factors than the physical (and sometimes mental) impairments one may have or acquire. The focus on treatment obscures the fact that disabled people need access to freedom from discrimination, to livable wages, to the right to vote and marry and have children (or not), to protection from physical, sexual, and emotional abuse—as well as to buildings, sidewalks, cars, and quality, non-discriminatory healthcare. In short, it is more fruitful to articulate and theorize disability as a cultural and political identity, not simply a constellation of medical diagnoses. As such, disability studies scholars and activists, and disabled people have also mobilized the discourse around pride as a corrective to external and internalized ableism. Being disabled is an identity to take pride in, not to hide and erase, or rehabilitate or cure. Within many spiritual contexts, healing is synonymous with cure, but through supernatural intervention rather than through medical technology. Healing-as-cure in these systems is most often issued as a harmful imperative, what Julia Watts Belser identifies as a “form of violence and a kind of imperialism” (Belser 2015, p. 178). Disabled people have been particularly victimized by this healing imperative. Belser continues that “[h]ealing as imperative promotes the assumption that ‘able’ bodies and minds are so obviously and naturally desirable that everyone should have them, that everyone should want them, that there is, in fact, no other dignified way to live” (Belser 2015, p. 178). As disability activist and cultural worker Imani Barbarin (2018) shares in a blog on her experience with faith and cerebral palsy: “In public, I was constantly stopped by strangers to be healed or prayed over. Hell, if I stood alone on a sidewalk for too long, I was bound to encounter at least one or two people who would ask to lay hands to heal me. Once, I even went to a conference where I briefly spoke about how damaging this type of behavior is to disabled people and immediately afterward I was surrounded by a group of people who were in that room and prayed over to soothe the ‘anger in my heart’”. Therefore, when the CEO of the Christian organization she worked for at the time responded to her comment that “Yeah, I know I’ll be healed when I get to heaven”, with “Who are you to say that God made a mistake when he made you? If you are made in his image, then you are already whole, so why wouldn’t you use your crutches in heaven?” (Barbarin 2018), she was flabbergasted. While the compulsion to pray for healing-as-cure is more common in the discourse of healing, what we see in Black women’s writing is an attitude that is more aligned with the latter. We are whole; healing is the spiritual work to undo the harmful, forced yet internalized belief that we are not—nor should be. Healing is the work of liberation. It is these writers’ embrace of Africanist spiritual paradigms of the bodymindspirit that inform this view of healing.

2. Conjure Stories as Disability Critique

We cannot understate how central African-based spirituality is to the Black women’s writing tradition. A robust body of scholarly work has discussed how Afro-diasporic spirituality emerges in Black women’s writing thematically and formally. This work includes Karla F.C. Holloway’s Moorings and Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender in Black Women’s Literature (Holloway 1992), Huston A. Baker Jr.’s Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women’s Writing (Baker 1991), Silvia Pilar Castro-Borrego’s The Search for Wholeness and Diaspora Literacy in Contemporary African American Literature (Castro-Borrego 2011), and Elizabeth J. West’s African Spirituality in Black Women’s Fiction (West 2012). While healing emerges as a theme in each, there are fewer studies dedicated to spiritual healing of the material body. Numerous scholarly studies contemplate Afro-diasporic religions and healing in Africana literature, but none situate their arguments within critical disability studies discourse. Valerie Lee’s Granny Midwives and Black Women Writers: Double Dutched-Readings (Lee 1996) provides a phenomenal study of both the history and literary representations of Granny Midwives, and, in so doing, discusses anti- and post-bellum African-American healing practices, which are a constitutive element of Afro-diasporic religions, like rootwork and conjure.1 Similarly, though less extensively, Kameelah L. Martin’s Conjuring Moments in African American Literature: Women, Spirit Work, and Other Such Hoodoo (Martin 2013) discusses Africana spirituality and the body as she analyzes the figure of the conjure woman, a figure that is also, typically, a (granny) midwife. Although these texts discuss illness, injury, healing, and wellness, disability as an embodied phenomena and social construction is out of the purview of these works. I extend their research and argue, however, that the representations of Black spirituality in the literature these scholars analyze, writings such as Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (Naylor 1989), demands that we engage disability as an analytic.

For instance, while Afro-diasporic spirituality is central to the plot of Naylor’s Mama Day, conflict within the narrative as well as the development of central characters are advanced through the novel’s representation of conjure, yes, but are also developed through experiences of illness, injury, and debility. While these representations can be considered narrative prostheses, they are not singularly so. Indeed, disability is politicized through the narrative’s critique of the dis/ability system. Entering literary and cultural analysis understanding disability as an analytic requires understanding dis/ability as a system. One, dis/ability opposed to disability signals “the mutual dependency of disability and ability to define one another” (Schalk 2017, p. 6). What and who is considered disabled is culturally constituted, and has and does shift over time and context. Or, as, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson explains, “The disability/ability system produces subjects by differentiating and marking bodies. Although this comparison of bodies is ideological rather than biological, it nevertheless penetrates into the formation of cuture, legitimating an unequal distribution of resources, status, and power within a biased social and architectural environment” (Garland-Thomson 2002, p. 5). Understanding and identifying the specific ways that dis/ability has been used in racializing processes is essential to the political and healing work of Black women’s literature. Likewise, disability as represented through an Afro-diasporic spiritual lens necessitates a political edge because their spiritual beliefs are inherently political. Mama Day is a variation of what Sharla Fett (2002) identifies as a conjure tale. In the archive of oral histories, specifically collected folklore from enslaved Black folk, Fett identifies four components of what she calls conjure stories: (1) the introduction of conflict, usually with a neighbor or family member; (2) details of the “bodily effects” of the fixed person’s affliction; (3) the search for a healer, and (4) the steps taken to uncross and heal the conjured person (Fett 2002, p. 86). Mama Day presents all four. Mama Day is a novel staged as a conversation between lovers Cocoa Day and George Andrews across the interconnected spaces of the physical, material world in which Cocoa resides, and that of the spirit and ancestors to which George has recently transitioned. Together, they reflect on the events leading up to George’s untimely death: their trip to Cocoa’s birth home, the fictional sea island of Willow Springs, to introduce George as her new husband to her grandmother, Abigail, and her great-Aunt and powerful conjure woman and midwife, Miranda, better known as Mama Day. The core plot point and central conflict in Mama Day unfold around Cocoa becoming frighteningly ill after Ruby, a neighbor and friend, as well as powerful conjure woman, grows jealous when she notices that her new beau is attracted to Cocoa, and Ruby fixes Cocoa with a deadly root. The plot unfolds as Cocoa becomes increasingly ill with debilitating symptoms, such as a full-body rash, bodily weakness, vertigo, and, eventually, hallucinations. Although Mama Day is a known and celebrated healer, Miranda needs George’s help to save Cocoa from Ruby’s conjure. However, George, who is an orphan, comes from the city, and relies on biomedical treatments for his heart, does not believe in the African-derived spiritual healing that informs Miranda’s healing modality. Consequently, part of the resolution to the conflict is to convince George to participate in conjure healing. When, in desperation, he accedes to trying Miranda’s conjure healing, he fails to complete the detailed ritual as directed. Cocoa is healed; however, she is healed by the sacrificial love magic George unwittingly performs. He sacrifices his life—his already disabled heart bursts as he battles a hurricane to get to a mainland medical doctor—to save Cocoa’s.

Significant to Fett’s theory and clearly seen in Mama Day’s plot is the emphasis on bodily affliction, what we might call illness, injury, or debility. Fett contends that “African American conjure stories are richly texture ‘illness narratives’ that reveal the collective context for illness and healing in southern plantation communities” (Fett 2002, p. 85). These conjure stories were not simply accountings of sickness and disability as an embodied state but also contained, according to Fett, “this sense of illness as a social and spiritual phenomenon unfolding in the context of specific historical communities” (Fett 2002, p. 85). Sickness and disability speak to states of the body and spirit, but are also mediated by encounters with the environments of one’s community rooted in a specific historical and material context. Fett’s analysis in a way prefigures disability studies scholar Nirmala Erevelles’s (2011) analysis of the interconnections of race and disability in her monograph Difference and Disability in Global Contexts Enabling a Transformative Body Politic. Erevelles’s transnational materialist historicist reading of disability articulates disability as a social and material process of becoming, and states that this process is constitutive of racialization and gendering. Conjure stories not only narrativize this process but also critique the forces active in this process of becoming.

Mama Day, as a conjure tale/illness narrative, for instance, uses what Kameelah L. Martin (2013) terms as conjuring moments to provide strident critiques of biomedical fertility treatments. “Conjuring moments”, as Martin theorizes in Conjuring Moments in African American Literature: Women, Spirit Work, and Other Such Hoodoo (Martin 2013), are “identifiable points in the text where conjuring or African-derived ceremonial practices occur and advance the narrative action” (Martin 2013, p. 5). As Mama Day, for instance, engages in healing conjure work on Bernice, a young woman Mama Day has been helping to conceive, we encounter a conjuring moment that is rife with commentary on modern attitudes about the biomedicalization of women’s fertility and reproductive health. Bernice comes to Mama Day with excruciating pelvic pain from what Bernice believes is a pregnancy. As Miranda performs a pelvic exam on Bernice while asking her probing questions, she realizes that not only is Bernice not pregnant but that she has inflamed ovaries after taking stolen fertility pills—specifically, Pergonal. The conjuring moment occurs in the dialogue and action of Miranda’s treatment: Miranda uses her root work knowledge and has Bernice chew choke-cherry bark to quell her pain. The narrative provides great detail on how much Mama Day gives Bernice, on the bitter taste of the root, on how Mama Day directs Bernice to chew, swallow her spit, spit out the bark, suck a candy, and repeat, on other ways to render the sap, on how Mama Day massages Bernice’s throat to aid swallowing and prevent gagging, and on what the bark looks like when it is time to stop administering it. Through this moment, the text posits that Miranda’s root work is not just as effective as biomedicine, but even more so, because of Miranda’s relationship to those who seek her help and her understanding of Willow Springs’ culture. Indeed, Mama Day takes partial blame for Bernice’s present condition, believing had she paid more attention to Bernice’s mindset, and noticed her desperation to conceive, she could have predicted that Bernice might take desperate action. Mama Day believes that had she considered this she could have chosen a line of treatment that better accounted for Bernice’s temperament. Additionally, this conjuring moment draws our attention to the harm pharmaceutical interventions can cause by incorporating elements of the then-current actual injury infertility drugs were creating. Pergonal is an actual fertility treatment that, in the 1970s, attracted critical attention when it was revealed the drug caused abdominal pain, enlarged ovaries, and ectopic pregnancies, among other symptoms. Conjure narratives, including those written by contemporary Black writers, are a source of discredited disability knowledge.

Crucial disability knowledge emerges out of Black women’s representations of Afro-diasporic spiritual epistemologies of, and approaches to, disability. Namely, that maiming Black women—discursively as well as physically, mentally, and spiritually—marks them for subjugation and continued debilitating violence. The body of this writing, however, does not articulate this as tragedy but as injustice. This is not to say that injustice is not tragic; however, distinguishing these as two different attitudes or beliefs about becoming disabled through white-supremacist patriarchal violence produces significant differences in how we experience disability and define disability justice. Black women writers insist that we destroy systems of injustice and harm, but also that it is imperative that Black women self-define and heal. Literature, and their writing, is central to this work. The canon of literature that emerges out of the Black Women’s Renaissance and after not only identifies and bears witness to the debilitating violence of misogynoir, but these works are also repositories of Africanist spiritual knowledge as disability knowledge, as well as healing tools and rituals in and of themselves.

This writing demonstrates how Black women’s sociopolitical status makes us vulnerable to debilitating violence, and that these debilities are what mark us for social oppression. Writers like Gloria Naylor and Erna Brodber present becoming disabled as a traumatic and violent racializing and gendering process. The violence of what Moya Bailey terms misogynoir is writ on Black women’s bodies, mind, and spirits—the latter of which is absent in disability studies frameworks, yet central to healing and liberation in this literature. These writings use Africanist spirituality to present a more capacious understanding of wholeness and wellness to reimagine healing. Specifically, these writers use the power of the Word, Nommo, to access spiritual healing power. Black women writers assume the power of the word to, as Karla F.C. Holloway has argued, “dissemble” the wholeness of the literary text (Holloway 1992, p. 68).2 The aesthetic and formal elements characteristic of these writers, the dialogic, recursive, open-ended, cyclical nature of Black women’s writing, results from a way of knowing and being that not only refuses wholeness of body and mind, but also refuses the wholeness of white narrative conventions. Disability shapes not only what these Black women write, but also how they write it. This body of writing guides us toward individual and communal healing. It understands that the individual needs a community of healers and that the individual must heal in order to serve the community.

3. Becoming Disabled: Soul Theft and Black Womanhood in Myal

To illustrate this argument, I turn to Erna Brodber’s 1988 novel, Myal. Myal unpacks the economic, social, cultural, physical, and psychic harm of colonialism in Jamaica at the turn of the twentieth century. This was a time of economic inequity as Britain and, newly, the U.S. increased their profits through trading materials extracted from Jamaica, while the local population suffered under the consequences of this resource siphoning, political unrest, and fire damage to one of their central economic ports. This inequity was underscored and exacerbated as trade, World War I, and tourism brought wealthier white people to the island, and poor Jamaicans became a class of disposable domestic and/or sex workers. Brodber explores these tensions through the spirit theft and subsequent healing of two Black Jamaican young women—Anita and mixed-raced (Black and European) Ella O’Grady-Langley. Spirit theft is a recurring fear in Myal that points to how colonial harm is not just material. It is also spiritual. Indeed, this is the focus of most scholarship on the novella. As Anne Margaret Castro (2015) argues, Myal represents the spiritual as connected with the physical.

Within a critical disability studies context, interventions informed through post-colonial theory have necessarily brought our attention to the need for a more nuanced analysis of disability within Global South contexts. As Barker and Murray (2010) contend, problems occur when these theories developed in the Global North are applied to Global South contexts. For one, a post-colonial analysis of disability demands attention to how colonialism has violently created disabilities. And this has been the focus of most of the post-colonial interventions in disability studies. Yet this focus is limited and limiting. It still privileges a European knowledge base. As Barker and Murray go on to explain, “In a variety of postcolonial contexts, culturally specific beliefs about embodiment, ontology, communal identity and belonging continue to shape disability experiences” (Barker and Murray 2010, p. 228). This is particularly important in interpreting representations of bodyminds in postcolonial writing. A text like Myal—and much of Black women’s cultural production across the diaspora at this time—demands that we pay attention to how colonialism creates physical and mental impairments, but also spiritual impairments, and how they are interwoven. When we fail to focus on the spiritual, we fail to consider culturally specific beliefs about embodiment and ontology, and how these shape attitudes about one’s relationship to the sick, injured, and debilitated bodymindspirit.

In Myal, for instance, women are the most vulnerable to sexual exploitation and violence. Sexual violence is a threat that mobilizes the plot in Myal and a specter that literally haunts the women and girls in this novel. Amy Holness assumes Maydene Brassington wants to steal Ella away from Mary for the Brassington boys’ sexual satisfaction, an assumption closely linked to Mary’s own experience in Morant Bay. Euphemia, Anita’s mother, also worries about Anita’s safety from seduction and unwanted pregnancy, as well as sexual assault. Myal complicates these fears of sexual violence by positing that policing Black girls’ bodymindspirits and sexuality is ineffective, especially when colonial education fractures body from mind and spirit, leaving them vulnerable to predation. Mass Levi uses Obeah to sexually assault Anita nightly. Rather than assault her in the flesh, however, these assaults come from a phantom presence—not seen but felt by Anita as well as Mrs. Amy Holness, who tries but fails to protect her. For Ella and Anita, sexual violence results in debilitating injury to their bodymindspirit.

Indeed, it is the colonial violence directed at women that initiates the conflict in Ella’s life. Ella’s mother, Mary, is hired as a domestic worker in the city of Morant Bay where she is then coerced into sexual labor for her employer, an Irish police officer named Ralston O’Grady. Although O’Grady offers to move her to Kingston with other women put in similar situations, she refuses. Rather than remain quietly complicit in this system that would benefit her and possibly Ella, Mary breaks the cycle and returns to the “bush” (Brodber 1988, p. 6). This form of sexual violence from itinerant white American and European men on the island is so commonplace as to be banal, even expected. What is noted as abnormal is Mary’s choice to return home once pregnant rather than enter into the class of “set up” mothers of half American or European-descended children. Mary and (particularly) Ella’s presence, with the latter’s “alabaster” skin, are sources of great consternation for the people in Grove Town. Adults feel “vexed” and “resentful” towards Ella and therefore ignore her; children seem to feel perplexed and tease her. Life is difficult for Ella in Grove Town. While scholars have discussed Ella’s alienation because of her light complexion, it is also important to note what Ella’s fair skin represents—“the sign of misbehaving” white men (Brodber 1988, p. 8). Ella’s pale skin makes it impossible to ignore or normalize the sexual exploitation of Black domestic workers. Evidence of the quieted rampant sexual predation of Black women and girls is stamped on Ella’s fair flesh.

In addition to the visible evidence of trauma, Ella’s light complexion also stokes frustrations regarding colorism and the color hierarchy that will come to mark the nature of racial prejudice in Jamaica. Brodber makes it clear in interviews and her non-fiction that she is aware of how colorism and class come to supplant more blatant racism in the wake of colonization. As Jamaica comes to be more Black, more non-white, more a mixture of various hues from descendants of the heterogenous ethnic–national populations, the preference for fairer skin and more European features, a preference reified by Black islanders, has become a central legacy of colonization. Adults recognize that Ella does not need skills to succeed; she needs only to rely on her light skin and European features to “carry her through”, which results in “resentment against her” (Brodber 1988, p. 10). It is Ella’s inherent color privilege that leads to communal divestment in her care and the community to stop “seeing her” (Brodber 1988, p. 11). Both adults and children justify neglecting Ella as a member of the Grove Town community by rejecting and reversing the superior qualities associated with light skin and white womanhood. Ella’s white skin is not delicate but sensitive and weak—“No strength at all” (Brodber 1988, p. 9). Yes, her skin marks her as too delicate for outdoor manual labor, but unnaturally so: “It was a rebuke to the very elements” (Brodber 1988, p. 9). Her straight hair is not fine and feminine, but slack, lifeless with no grip, and unsuitable for rough play. Ella’s quiet nature is not submissive and demure, or even shy, but “odd” and “strange” (Brodber 1988, pp. 10 and 26). The ideals associated with white womanhood that elevate fairer skin in the color hierarchy are diminishing in Grove Town. The ableist constructions of white womanhood as delicate, fragile, and weak (sometimes outright sickly) at once mark white women as worthy of privilege, protection, and care—over and against Black women as brutish, hyper-able, and unassailable—even as it justifies their subjugation to men through paternalism and infantilization.

Although Ella’s European features are a point of derision among the Grove Town people, people assume she would be better off capitalizing on her proximity to whiteness. Indeed, she, on her own, comes to identify with whiteness: “When they [teachers] brought out the maps and showed Europe, it rose from the paper in three dimensions, grew big, came right down to her seat” and “She met people who looked like her. She met Peter Pan and she met the Dairy Maid who could pass for her sister–same two long plaits and brownish” (Brodber 1988, p. 11). Ella not only identifies with these characters, but she elevates her imagined friends above tropes about Blackness applied to people in Grove Town. For instance, once she (passively) passes as full Irish after moving to Boston, Ella reflects:

“So here she lived in Baltimore there were no Reverend Simpsons, black with a mouth stretching from one side of his face to the other like a bulldog and looking just as stern; no Ole African with his dreadful hair; no Mass Levi with black palms, finger nails, gums and not even Mammy Mary with skin dark cream like the sweet potato. Here there were only adult Peter Pans, Dairy Maids and Lucy Grays and a fair sampling of their relatives seen not in daily intercourse but now and again when they floated in through the big oak door, with their umbrellas and overcoats, on appointment. This was the king of life–pale-skinned people floating–that Ella had seen for most of the many years of her daydreaming existence”.

(Brodber 1988, pp. 45–46)

While these descriptors are not inherently negative, it is noteworthy that this is Ella’s own image of her Grove Town community. This surreal fantasy of Blackness is what she gives to Sewlyn and is reproduced and packaged as reality in his minstrelsy. Indeed, Ella’s trip to Boston is the first time that she confronts her fantasy of whiteness while present in her own flesh. Traveling to Boston with Miss Burns is Ella’s first time traveling to and inhabiting predominantly white cities in her physical body. Ella also begins experiencing the world through the awareness of her body while in Boston. She only begins to inhabit her body when transplanted into a predominantly white space. It is only as she begins to process the world through her bodymind that she is thrust into racial awareness and, violently, into racial consciousness. Ella does not experience debility because of her proximity to white womanhood and the ableism embedded within cultural narratives of that identity. It is her fungible yet immutable and enfleshed Blackness that marks her for debilitation.

Race is performative but also instantiated by historical processes rooted in the fleshiness of the body. Ella is able to perform whiteness and access certain spaces and opportunities because of that performance, but she is ultimately locked into a pattern of relationality with Sewlyn that iterates and reiterates her Blackness. Ella is singled out for training and care because of her light skin and ability to parrot the then-canonical, colonial literature. Initially, Maydene Brassington decides to othermother Ella, but Ella eventually ends up in the care of a wealthy American socialite with loose economic ties to Jamaica, Mrs. Johnny Burns. While in Mrs. Burns’s charge, Ella meets Sewlyn, a reluctant heir to a pharmaceutical empire in the U.S., in Morant Bay. Sewlyn becomes smitten with Ella’s “exoticism” and plots to seduce her. While Ella’s narrative threatens to echo that of her mother’s, Mary’s, Sewlyn, at the behest of Mrs. Burns, agrees to marry Ella and move her to New England with him. Once in the U.S., Sewlyn directs Ella to acknowledge only her Irish heritage, or, in other words, pass as white, which she is able to do with ease. Indeed, Ella does not recognize her racial difference until Sewlyn educates her: “It was Sewlyn who explained to her in simple terms that she was coloured, mulatto and what that meant, taking her innocence with her hymen in return for guidance through the confusing fair that was America. Ella was hooked and she liked the drug” (Brodber 1988, p. 43). Crucially, Ella’s racial consciousness is tethered to her sexuality and completely controlled by her white, male paramour. Moreover, Sewlyn takes pleasure in making the “story” of Ella’s white womanhood “live” (Brodber 1988, p. 43); he also loves, perhaps even more, listening to her talk about Grove Town. Sewlyn extracts all he can of Ella’s recollection of Jamaica, material he recognizes as valuable, as the “purest gold”, and “refines” this material into “the biggest coon show ever” (Brodber 1988, p. 80). Despite Sewlyn’s ability to make the story of Ella’s whiteness come to life, the profitability of her Blackness, his ability and desire to extract her labor, traps them in a pattern of racializing relations that bars Ella’s and Sewlyn’s fiction of whiteness from becoming a reality. Ella’s Blackness is simply more lucrative.

As it were, through their skewed relationship, Sewlyn also enacts and underscores his whiteness. Toni Morrison’s theorization of the Africanist presence in American literature powerfully explains the process of becoming white, or the “position to assume absolute control” over another. Morrison continues that once in that position, one is “a new man, a distinctive man–a different man”, and no matter one’s station in the metropole, “in the New World he is a gentleman. More gentle, more man. The site of his transformation is within rawness: he is backgrounded by savagery” (Morrison [1992] 2007, p. 44). At first, it seems that living in post-emancipation America has foreclosed this process of cementing Sewlyn’s whiteness. The narrator in Myal explains, and I quote at length,

“If Selwyn Langley had been born in eighteenth or nineteenth century Britain and of upper class parentage, he would have been called a black sheep. He would have been sent off to Jamaica and would have met Ella O’Grady and chosen her from among his stock to be his housekeeper. He would have given her two children, made his fortune and returned to England as an ordinary sheep ready for his rightful place in the fold there and she would have been left with a small consideration, and her children, with what she could make of it, along with their very profitable skin colour”.

(Brodber 1988, p. 42)

Despite this nostalgic nod to the ease with which one in Sewlyn’s position could arise “a new man”, these processes have not gone extinct, but have evolved. Sewlyn assumes absolute control over Ella in the U.S. Moreover, he takes the “rawness” of Ella’s memories of Jamaica and cultivates them into a consumable product, a cultural product that places Black Jamaicans as the savage backdrop to his whiteness. Indeed, when Sewlyn assumes his “natural” position of control over Ella, he does, in fact, become more of a gentleman. As Sewlyn nears completing Caribbean Nights and Days, he starts “settling down” into his “proper colour” and “cut”. However, his changed relation to whiteness-as-power requires reconsideration of his relationship with Ella. He realizes “that one could take a joke too far” (Brodber 1988, p. 80)—in this case, having legitimate children with Ella. Myal takes great care to note how the relationship between race and reproduction, particularly whiteness, has shifted and yet stayed the same.

I quote the above passage from Myal at length because it so compellingly demonstrates how racialization shifts according to time and place, yet, always, domination and the extraction of (sexual) labor are central to this process. Had Sewlyn been born British in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, having children with Ella would be of no consequence. Indeed, Sewlyn’s hypothetical children’s skin color would not only be profitable to them in a society organized according to a color hierarchy, but also to Sewlyn in a culture and economy that, to use Christina Sharpe’s phrasing, makes “some persons into kin and some into property” (Sharpe 2010, p. 28), partus sequitur ventrem absolving him of blemishing his patrilineal class inheritance. Although Sewlyn and Ella’s relationship is distinguished by the cessation of the slave economy, and therefore involves a different mode of extraction, Sewlyn nevertheless understands how Ella’s womb is a continued progenitor of Blackness, but in a context wherein miscegenation is denounced rather than quietly accepted as a mechanism of domination and enriching one’s property. He uses prophylactics or otherwise abstains from sex with Ella while secretly masturbating. As Shalini Puri sums up, “With [Ella’s] racial doubleness born of a forcible colonial coupling, Ella is not-quite-black-enough for most blacks to be comfortable with her; she is just-black-enough to be exotic and exciting to her white American husband; she is not-quite-white-enough to be worthy of carrying his children” (Puri 1993, p. 99). Thus, the joke is, ultimately, on Ella. Despite her free-born status, her mixed-race parentage, her fair skin, her geographical distance from Grove Town, and her passing as white, she is still haunted by partus sequitur ventrem, but is the only one in the couplet who does not know it.

While Shalini Puri (1993) and many other scholars identify Myal as a Bildungsroman, I would like to draw our attention to how, in many ways, Ella’s story is a passing narrative, with Ella starring as the tragic mulatta. As with other tragic mulatta figures, such as Clare from Nella Larsen’s Passing, Ella denies her race in order to marry a white suitor. Like the tragic mulatto tales of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Ella befalls a tragic fate due to the racially interstitial space she occupies. Myal, however, revises the tragic mulatta narrative in that Ella’s husband, Sewlyn, knows that she is of Black Jamaican descent. It is from his family and social and cultural group that he hides this fact—until he is able to profit from her exoticness by co-opting her (his)story into a minstrel show. Then, Ella’s still-racially-ambiguous yet exotic status lends authenticity to Sewlyn’s claims of verisimilitude, though his caricature—complete with white actors in black face—could never boast such. Like the tragic mulatta story, Ella’s reproductive capacities become the crux of racial anxiety in her portion of the narrative, though unbeknownst to her. Whereas the traditional tragic mulatta fears discovery through the birth of a child or learns of her own “tainted” racial heritage after giving birth, Ella is seemingly unable to conceive, echoing late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century anti-miscegenation pseudo-science that speculated that Black–white mixed-race people were sterile, like mules. Indeed, Ella’s Blackness is reaffirmed by this association. Much as Janie’s granny in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Black women—including Ella—are the mules of the world; fit only for a life of debilitating, hard labor. In Myal, however, the issue is not that Ella cannot conceive as a natural consequence of a so-called unnatural coupling; rather, reproduction is intentionally foreclosed. Sewlyn secretly uses prophylactics—actually, they are his best friend—and he masturbates. Although Ella’s childlessness recalls other, barren mulatta literary figures, such as Gayl Jones’s Ursa Corregidora, her narrative still aligns her with other tragic mulatta heroines such as William Wells Brown’s Clotel, Harriet Jacobs’s Linda Brent, and Francis E.W. Harper’s Iola Leroy, who, as we see with Ella, were ultimately abandoned and debilitated. She sustains a spiritual injury that debilitates her body and mind.3

Anita, another young woman in Myal, is also vulnerable to debilitating violence. Unlike Ella, Anita has no European parentage, yet, like Ella, Anita is marked for care because of her intellectual acumen. She is a star student whom Teacher Holness selects for grooming into a future teacher. However, Anita begins to experience harassment from an unidentified source. Rocks rain upon her roof night and day, and when she moves, she begins to have nighttime fits as if some unseen force is physically assaulting her as she sleeps. Eventually, it comes to light that Levi, a respected figure of authority in Grove Town and secretly versed in Obeah, is responsible for the spiritual assault on Anita.

The fragmentation of her body from her mind from her spirit makes Anita vulnerable to spiritual attack, but she is selected for attack because of her status as a Black girl. Like Ella, this fragmentation occurs within the space and site of European-based education that privileges mind over body. While Ella dissociates into the white-washed world of European children’s literature, Anita is immersed in practicing reading notes and rehearsing pitch while singing a Christian song. Music and sound, in Myal, are particularly powerful. The music Anita practices does not come naturally. It is something that she must force, must splinter herself to create. Indeed, Ella’s debilitation is marked by a discordant sound. Similarly, Anita’s spiritual attack is marked by a discordant disruption to the foreign sounds that she is trying to imitate: she hears the loud ping of stones falling on her roof. Initially, it is assumed that a suitor is responsible for throwing stones to get Anita’s attention, and therefore generally accepted, notably by Teacher and Euphemia, Anita’s mother. Their delayed understanding of the viciousness and violence of this attack is because hypersexualizing Black girls is normalized. For instance, Euphemia, initially, is tickled by the presumed attention, though wary that Anita has begun to attract the attention of boys and may desire that attention. More compelling is Teacher Holnesses initial reflection on the situation. Whereas Teacher initially responds with anger and incredulity, particularly after noticing the “coco” on Anita’s head, his reflection changes as he comes to see her as a sexual object:

“Amy had laughing suggested that some young man might be trying to get Anita’s attention. It was then that he saw the smooth black skin, the high chest, the sink in her back and the spread of her buttocks; saw her win that race as she did everything else and saw himself thinking as he had done then, ‘What a fine, well-groomed horse’”.

(Brodber 1988, p. 31)

In this passage, Teacher fractures Anita’s bodymindspirit. He takes interest in her mind, but then notices and sexualizes her body, further fragmenting it into discrete parts, sexualized and desirable. Indeed, he reverts to the logics of chattel slavery, likening her to a prize horse. Despite the harm caused by the rocks, Teacher comes to empathize with this imagined admirer in their shared desire for Anita’s sexualized body. Violence against the bodies of Black girls is justified as objects of boys’ and men’s sexual desire.

Myal links sexual violence to the acquisition and maintenance of power, and illustrates how able-bodiedness and -mindedness are prerequisites needed to access power. Although Levi uses Obeah to violate Anita, his assault appears to have little to do with sexual desire. In fact, his choice to violate her has everything to do with his own hunger for authority, yet growing feelings of powerlessness. Despite being a landlord and community mediator, Levi is convinced that his authority and command over Grove Town have diminished. Though the narrator dismisses Levi’s concern that people now doubt his authority, positioning it as a paranoid suspicion shared only by Levi, he is nevertheless convinced he has lost status within Grove Town—primarily because of changes in his bodymindspirit. Known only to him and Iris, Levi has had a stroke that has caused sexual impotence and caused him to believe his ability to manipulate others has weakened. Because he experiences an unwanted change in his bodymind, a change he views as diminutive and emasculating, he believes his position of authority in society has changed. Moreover, it is insufficient to be able to appear able-bodied—folks in Grove Town are ignorant that he has had a stroke and clueless about his sexual performance; he must actually meet an idealized standard of embodiment. In Levi’s mind, the power to dominate others is inextricably tied to able-bodied, virile manhood, and able-bodied, virile manhood is entangled with the power to dominate.

Thus, it is clear that Levi chooses to assault Anita as an act of domination and display of power. However, Levi is unable to rape Anita with his physical body. Moreover, Levi desires a position of moral superiority. He wants people to fear and respect him—not persecute him as a pervert. Thus, Levi uses Obeah as an African-derived religion to both ends. Levi centralizes himself as a model of accountability by speculating that his own son may be the culprit behind the stone-throwing. In so doing, he gives the illusion that he is both humble and righteous: he is willing to publicly hold his own son accountable when presumably most people would defend their children against such accusations. Moreover, he sends his spirit to rape Anita, which exercises power through subjugation and injurious violence against her bodymindspirit while it also siphons energy from her that then replenishes and restores his able-embodiment. He uses Anita’s bodymindspirit as a natural resource from which he can extract what he needs and discard the rest. Undeniably, Levi is a formidable practitioner of Obeah because he maintains the integration of his body, mind, and spirit. However, internalized ableism and heterosexism, as well as a lust for the power to dominate, compels him to use his spiritual finesse to enact harm. Both Anita and Ella are debilitated because of men’s zeal for power and privilege through the absolute subjection of others.

White supremacist imperialist capitalist heterosexism, therefore, is shown to be problematically ableist, as well as a debilitating force. As Black girls in a country still besieged by the political, economic, and cultural whims of white, imperialist nations, Ella and Anita initially, and unknowingly, experience debilitation as a result of these forces. In their case, indoctrination into white mores through a colonized institution of education fractures the integrity of their bodymindspirits, leaving them vulnerable to further subjugation and debilitation. The local actors of their assaults are similarly inconspicuous, and the consequences are insidious but no less injurious to Ella and Anita’s bodymindspirits. Ella’s stomach begins to bloat and distend as she is convinced she is pregnant with the baby Jesus. Anita is physically marked/scarred, and her body begins to atrophy. Both young women experience such intense, prolonged psychic and spiritual distress that soul murder, what Deborah King defines as spiritual brokenness, more aptly names their affliction (King 2008, p. 39). In Myal, debilitation is sustained in spirit, as well as body and mind.

While Ella and Anita’s stories are spectacular in their intensity, their status as Black girls and women vulnerable to debilitating trauma is a shared and central experience. Even those who appear racially ambiguous are marked as Black through debilitation. Black women writers present becoming disabled as a traumatic and violent racializing and gendering process. Healing, therefore, is an embodied form of social and political redress and an essential component of justice and liberation. However, African-derived spiritual paradigms of embodiment allow Black women’s body of writing to articulate healing without reifying the curative imaginary. These texts present a cosmology and ontology that open other possible ways of relating to the injured and disabled body outside of curative time.

4. Healing beyond the Crip Imaginary

In Myal, Ella and Anita are healed from the debilitating injuries done to their souls through the Afro-diasporic spiritual practice of Myal. Within the Black space of Grove Town, Anita’s illness is immediately recognized as an assault on her bodymindspirit in need of a spiritual remedy. Among white Americans, however, Ella’s ailments are approached through biomedical interventions (remember, Sewlyn is the heir to a pharmaceutical empire), which ultimately prove unsuccessful. She is expeditiously sent back to the bush. Once back in the Black space of Grove Town, the community recognizes that Ella needs a doctor who understands that “Curing the body is nothing. Touching the peace of those she must touch and those who must touch her is the hard part” (Brodber 1988, p. 1). She, too, then undergoes a Myal healing that addresses her physical, mental, and spiritual symptoms. Though the Myal healing never fully rehabilitates Ella’s mind, once spiritually healed she is incorporated into anti-colonial resistance projects. In other words, Ella is disabled but well, and with her wellness employed to “touch the peace of those she must touch”.

While Myal may suggest that spiritual healing and biomedical treatment are oppositional, in the broader Black women’s literary tradition, both approaches to treating injury and illness are useful, and, often, exist on a spectrum where the distinctions between them are, at times, blurred. Black women writers approach illness, injury, cure, and healing through African-derived spiritual cosmologies and onto-epistemologies that acknowledge the physical, mental, and spiritual components of the self, and treat spiritual and medicinal healing knowledge as equally valid and efficacious. Without dismissing the potential usefulness of biomedical science, Afro-diasporic spiritual healing systems do not equivocate healing and wellness to cure and the recuperation of able-embodiment. In Black women’s writing, healing must be reframed away from the medical model of disability and the discourse of cure.

The medical model of disability is the predominant approach to disability in the U.S. and other Western countries. The medical model understands disability as a personal deficiency and the disabled body and mind as aberrant, as an anomaly. Being born disabled or becoming disabled is considered a tragedy, and the medical model assumes that being disabled conscripts one to a life of suffering because of the limitations of one’s body. Simultaneously, the medical model of disability understands disabled people as unreliable narrators of their embodied experience, and instead compels compulsive deference to the knowledge and authority of medical professionals. These professionals, using the latest advancements in biomedical technology, are responsible for working one-on-one with individual patients to rehabilitate and/or, more ideally, cure and prevent disability. Within medical model frameworks, disability is an individual problem for medical science. Disability, treatment and cure are not political, and they certainly are not matters of the spirit.

In Feminist, Queer, Crip (Kafer 2013), Alison Kafer identifies compulsive able-bodiedness, and names that compulsion curative imaginary. Kafer explains that “curative imaginary” is “an understanding of disability that not only expects and assumes intervention but also cannot imagine or comprehend anything other than intervention” (Kafer 2013, p. 27). In other words, curative imagery theorizes a relationship to bodies where the injured, sick, and disabled body must be acted on to ensure ongoing progress to desirable futures. According to Kafer, “Futurity has often been framed in curative terms, a time frame that casts disabled people (as) out of time, or as obstacles to the arc of progress”. This is what Kafer designates “curative time”. Ironically, though disabled people “are not part of the dominant narratives of progress”, they “play a starring role” as “the sign of progress, the proof of development, the triumph over the mind or body” once they are “rehabilitated, normalized, and hopefully cured” (Kafer 2013, p. 28). Progress is a fantasy, in the global white imaginary, of onward and upward advance in society and technology that is measured, as Alison Kafer compellingly contends, by the gradual elimination of disability. We determine progress by biomedical technologies’ ability to predict and prevent disability and restore and cure those who become ill or injured. We determine progress by biomedical innovations that can increase privileged people’s lifespans while also forestalling or altogether eliminating the changes in ability that come from aging. Progress is achieved over a span of time that is teleological and linear, while visions of the future may include racial harmony and peace, often through homogenizing processes that adjust societal norms and expectations but nevertheless capitulate to them and measure progress by greater adherence to them. Ability-as-progress is not a vision of the future rooted in justice and liberation. Liberation, however, is the measure of better futures in Black women’s writing, a measure that necessitates wellness but is not marked by able-bodiedness, nor articulated as attained according to the teleological logic of onward progress of Western cosmologies. In her book, Alison Kafer discusses “approaches to futurity beyond curative ones”, exploring queer temporalities as a theory not beholden to or rife with curative time. Here, I respond to Kafer’s query by positing African spiritual cosmologies as divested from curative imaginaries and curative time. Moreover, the cosmologies that inform African-derived religions present additional iterations of crip time—experiences in and of one’s body “that render time ‘queer’” (Kafer 2013, p. 34), necessary for understanding the experiences of disabled people across the African diaspora.

Returning to Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (Naylor 1989), Miranda’s approach to healing is informed by her work as a conjure woman. Illness, injury, disease, and disability are not reduced to the individual deficiencies of the body, but are shaped by our relationships to and experiences within the spiritual, natural, social, cultural, economic, and political world around us. Health is relational. As Stephanie Mitchem (2007) observes of African American folk healing, “To explore African American folk healing is to open up a vista of black American concepts about life, bodies, death, and nature. Such concepts may have spiritual referents, may move into political action, or may serve as the homegrown analysis of society” (Mitchem 2007, p. 11). This “homegrown analysis of society” is necessary for survival. George fails to survive in the physical realm with Cocoa because he has internalized racist narratives about Black spirituality that have disconnected him from the community. As Cocoa becomes more and more ill from the conjure used against her, Mama Day grows concerned with her survival, and George becomes desperate for a remedy. Mama Day needs George’s help to save Cocoa, needs him to join his hand in hers, but George is unable to break free of medical approaches to illness and disability that confer ultimate authority over sickness to allopathic medicine and emphasize individualism. Miranda reflects,

“He believes in himself—deep within himself—‘cause he ain’t never had a choice. And he keeps it protected down in his center, but she needs that belief buried in George. Of his own accord he has to hand it over to her. She needs his hand in hers—his very hand—so she can connect it up with all the believing that had gone before. A single moment was all she asked, even a fingertip to touch hers here at the other place. So together they could be the bridge for Baby Girl to walk over. Yes, in his very hands he already held the missing piece she’d come looking for”.

(Naylor 1989, p. 285)

Refusing to embrace Mama Day’s hand is a refusal to embrace his and Cocoa’s African roots. Joining hands with Mama Day is symbolic of a connection to all the wisdom and knowledge of the ancestor, the power of the ancestor. However, as Silvia del Pilar Castro-Borrego (2011) argues, “[u]nfortunately George, Cocoa’s practical husband, does not believe in the power of the ancestors. George, who ignores his own family history, has been insistently taught that ‘only the present has potential’” (Castro-Borrego 2011, p. 23).

African spiritual models of healing differ from the medical model of disability in significant ways. One, “In general, African understandings of the body perceive it ‘as the agent of concrete totality, radical identity, and ontological unity of the human’” (Mitchem 2007, p. 35). There is a presumed, inherent wholeness of the bodymindspirit. Symptoms are irreducible to the body alone. Instead, illness, disease, and debility are viewed holistically. Pain and sickness are considered manifestations of a complex constellation of factors that can impact the bodymindspirit. Experiences of the bodymindspirit are understood relationally. The body, mind, and spirit are interconnected. People, plants, trees, water, rocks, and the earth are interdependent. The physical and spiritual worlds interact. “Black folk healing encompasses not only the individual but links between a person to community and cosmos” (Mitchem 2007, p. 26). Consequently, biomedical interventions alone cannot always treat what ails people, and the body is not viewed through a deficit model. Indeed, as Stephanie Mitchem observes, “It follows, then, that spiritual values and meanings are reflected in the body itself. Differently shaped bodies, sometimes deemed a ‘deformity’ in Western eyes, might instead be considered spiritually meaningful, depending on the African tradition. The body signals something about the spiritual life, encompassing the personal, familial, and communal in the present moment” (Mitchem 2007, p. 35). However, the temporality of the present, as George understands it through a medical model, and the present moment Mitchem describes are differentiated by different cosmologies that determine the rules of reality.

The “present” of the medical model of disability isolates the present from the past. The past only comes to bear on the present as a measure of human progress and accomplishment. The “present” of Black cosmologies encompasses the past. The past is always with us. We do not move onward and away from the past. Instead, we are “in touch at once with the past, present, ancestors, and nature spirits” (Bird 2022, p. 15). Time is not linear but cyclical. Futurity is better understood as eternal. It follows that disabled people are not out of time but part of the eternal in their ontological wholeness. Herein lies another approach to futurity—in addition to the ones Alison Kafer identifies—that does not rely on curative time or a curative imaginary. The ever-fluctuating state of one’s wellness may require attention, especially as wellness is relational and can have direct implications for the larger community, but the fundamental integrity of one’s bodymindspirit is eternal. It is this other understanding of futurity that presents the opportunity for George’s healing from his internalized anti-Blackness. It is his responsibility as an ancestor. Within Western frames, death marks the end of life. Even within Christian theological principles, death marks a transition to eternal realms separate from the physical world. In African-derived cosmologies, the physical and spiritual realms interact. Our wholeness is given but there are still lessons and healing that can and need to be completed in our spiritual state. Healing, too, is eternal. Unlike curative logics wherein cure is a static state, healing is a process.

Wellness is not a constant or consistent state. Nor is it synonymous with able-bodiedness. Consequently, in Black women’s writing, health, particularly health as the absence of disability, is not a sign of progress. Indeed, progress is not a useful concept within the frame of these cosmologies. To quote Mitchem quite extensively,

“In African American communities, ‘wellness’ may be a better descriptive term to use when discussing the aims of families and individuals in healing processes as opposed to the term ‘health’. Wellness implies a temporary condition rather than a possession. ‘Wellness,’ rather than ‘health,’ aligns with the workings of black folklore, cultural traditions, and cultural resistance. ‘Wellness’ references activity and goals rather than a finished product that is a commodity. Additionally, ‘wellness’ serves to emphasize, by contrast, the way the word ‘health’ is generally used in American medical culture and thereby stands in opposition to the commercialization of American medicine. Because it is less commonly used, ‘wellness’ can more easily indicate a holistic view of what should be healed, aiming for wholeness and harmony”.

(Mitchem 2007, p. 29)

Wellness, then, as a spiritual state, in addition to a physical and mental condition, is not a marker of progress but a tool in the fight for liberation. One must be well enough to perform the cultural, political, and spiritual work necessary to end systematic and institutional oppression and violence. Acute, life-threatening injuries or illnesses must be treated and debilitating violence and material conditions must end, and there is space for a range of bodymindspirits to join in the liberation struggle.

5. Conclusions: Nommo and the Healing Power of the Word

Healing in Black women’s writing is not only a predominant theme but also a process initiated by the act of writing and reading. Unlike the individualism of the curative imaginary, which views treatment as a normalizing process, healing views wellness as a social and political tool. Wellness is not a goal in and of itself, but a state to attain in service of manifesting desirable outcomes. For Black women, this is our collective liberation. In Myal, for instance, Ella and Anita undergo a Myal healing not only for their general wellness but also so that they can effectively infiltrate and destabilize the power within colonial institutions. The story reveals that the healing practitioners/spiritual leaders plan to use the power of narrative, and of the word, as a mode of attack against ongoing soul theft and murder under colonialism. One of the African-derived spiritual principles that inform healing in Myal is Nommo, or the power of the word. Nommo is the power of the “life force” that “produces all life” (Jahn [1961] 1990, p. 124). Nommo is embodied spiritual power used to create and change the surrounding world. More specifically, one must literally speak that which one wants to manifest. The spoken word is not simply linguistic, but an activating of natural forces with the supernatural. As scholar of African philosophy Janheinz Jahn explains, “Nommo is water and the glow of fire and seed and word in one” (Jahn [1961] 1990, p. 124). Nommo is action, element, and magic. It is a force that refuses binaries and sharp divisions between the body, natural phenomena, and the supernatural. As a tool used by the living, the ancestors, and the orishas, it resists the division of the living, the dead, and the divine. Nommo as the power to create can also be used to harm and heal.

I have discussed at great length how Black spiritual tools have been used to harm in this literature, and how systems of domination harm Black folks not just materially and physically, but also spiritually, as all of these aspects of the self are intertwined. In Myal and Mama Day, for instance, we see at the interpersonal level, and at the level of grand projects of white supremacy and cultural imperialism and colonialization, how the “lust for power” compels the use of Nommo’s rhetorical power destructively. Both Ella and Anita, under vastly different circumstances, are robbed of their Nommo and zombified. Nommo as executed through colonial education and literature or internalized anti-Blackness is no less intentionally transformative than Ruby’s conjure or Levi’s fetish and book Obeah. And like George, Ella, Cocoa and Anita, the readers, who emerge out of ongoing projects of (neo) colonial, (neo) imperial, neo-liberalism, and anti-Blackness, too, are likely to have been injured through harmful Nommo. We all need healing.

Self-definition is central to healing in this body of writing. In Myal, the Myal healers have Ella infiltrate colonial institutions and replace the colonial word with their own. In Mama Day, George and Cocoa fill in the gaps and correct the misinformation that cursed their relationship. Healing, then, is taking back one’s Nommo. As Pin-Chia Feng (2002) argues, Myal “stress[es] the importance of being able to name the crime or trauma, which corresponds to the belief in the mysterious power of word or nomo (sic) in African tradition”, and the “invocation of spirituality in general and rituals in particular as the ways in which these traumas can be described and de-scribed” (Feng 2002, p. 152).

These texts themselves, then, in identifying the many sources of subjugation, naming the debilitating effects of misogynoir, and articulating an alternative self and (Black) world, enact Nommo. Transformative are acts of conjure/Myal. As Feng contends, “The act of writing, in this case, is similar to that of performing a myal ritual”, and “that Brodber … invites her readers to participate in this ritual; our understanding of the depth of the crime is meant to prevent spirit thievery from recurrence” (Feng 2002, p. 157). The writing and reading act is not only meant to prevent spirit thievery, but also to heal the injuries of it. Writers like Naylor and Brodber are what Valerie Lee (1996) names Sistah Conjurers, and their body of literature facilitates what Lee calls healing moments. They empower us to reintegrate our bodies, minds and spirits, and re/self-define our relationship to our bodies, our histories, and our worlds.