247 p., Discusses the diasporic origins of Palo Mayombe, a Kongo-Cuban religious tradition, while seeking to analyze how it fulfills, in a new transplanted setting, the spiritual needs of a given segment of the Cuban immigrant population in the United States—designated here as the “strangers in a new land”—“serving not only as a healing mechanism but also a vehicle towards the preservation of ethnic and cultural identity.”
Lachatañeré,Rómulo (Author) and Ayorinde,Christine (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2005
Published:
Princeton, NJ: M. Wiener Publishers
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
156 p, Distinguishes between the two most important religious forms - the Regla de Ocha (Santeria), which promotes worship of the Oshira (gods), and the traditional oracles that originated in the old Yoruba city of lle-lfe', which promote a more animistic worldview. Africans who were brought to Cuba as slaves had to recreate their old traditions in their new Caribbean context. As their African heritage collided with Catholicism and with Native American and European traditions, certain African gods and traditions became more prominent while others lost their significance in the new Afro-Cuban culture. This book, the first systematic overview of the syncretization of the gods of African origin with Catholic saints, introduces the reader to a little-known side of Cuban culture.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
218 p, Contents: Origins of the divestiture trope in selected literature of the African diaspora -- Diaspora as a trope for the existential condition -- Resonances of the African continent in selected fiction and non-fiction by Zora Neale Hurston -- Orphanage in Simone Schwarz-Bart's The bridge of beyond and Alice Walker's The third life of Grange Copeland -- Polyphonic texture of the trope "junkheaped" in Toni Morrison's Beloved -- Sociological implications of female abandonment in Buchi Emecheta's Second class citizen and The joys of motherhood -- Success phobia of Deighton Boyce in Paul Marshall's Brown girl, Brownstones -- Madness as a response to the female situation of disinheritance in Mariama Bâ's So long a letter and Scarlet song -- Exile of the elderly in Beryl Gilroy's Frangipani house and Boy-Sandwich -- Conclusion: abandonment as a trope for the human condition;
