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- Title
Caribbean Religious Syncretism in Earl Lovelace's The Wine of Astonishment.
- Authors
Nakamura Tohru
- Abstract
Earl Lovelace's novel of 1982, The Wine of Astonishment, reveals the vitality of black creole cultural tradition by studying a Caribbean syncretic religion called the Spiritual Baptist faith. There are at least four claimants for the origins of the religion: a Dahomean who founded a Rada center near Port of Spain in 1855; African American immigrants during the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812; immigrants from St Vincent in the 1910s and 1920s; and Trinidadians of Yoruban ethnicity who converted to Protestantism (Edmonds/Gonzalez, 145-6). The Spiritual Baptist religion has been practiced not only locally in St Vincent, Grenada, Barbados, and Trinidad, but has also been carried by migrants to places outside the Caribbean including Toronto, London, and New York. Now, recognized as one of the Caribbean syncretist religious practices like the Haitian Voodoo, the Jamaican Rastafari and Pocomania, and the Cuban Santería and Palo Monte, it illustrates what is called creolization, an unplanned, contingent, and paradoxical interplay between races and cultures which generates a 'new and rich phenomenon which is neither Africa nor Europe, yet embodying the two in unprecedented and creative modes of relationship' (Nettleford, 173). As Antonio Benítez-Rojo argues: 'In black Africa, religion is everything, and at the same time it is nothing, for it can't be isolated from the world of phenomena or even of Being. Keeping this in mind, we can affirm that the influence of Africa upon the nations of the Caribbean is... a predominantly religious one' (159).
- Subjects
LOVELACE, Earl, 1935-; AMERICAN Revolutionary War, 1775-1783; PROTESTANTISM
- Publication
Japan Mission Journal, 2021, Vol 75, Issue 4, p255
- ISSN
1344-7297
- Publication type
Article