Women Who Know Things: African Epistemologies, Ecocriticism, And Female Spiritual Authority in the Novels of Toni Morrison.

In her novels, Toni Morrison mediates the distance between African belief systems and western hemispheric realities of Africans in America. Repeatedly, Morrison illustrates how African women, soul workers, continue to employ symbolic, temporal and cultural codes reflective of African traditional religions and indigenous values. Sculpting spiritual landscapes emblematic of Yoruba, Kongo and various African spiritual systems, Morrison imbues her work with sacred features to simultaneously recover ancestral memory and engender the individual's and community's future endeavors. Asserting the circularity of and concentricity of African cosmologies, Morrison links her narratives with the sacred, symbolized by elements of nature to cleanse the community, re-integrate the African personality, and restore cohesion. Eco-critical ideas will be explored with a brief examination of Morrison's literary creation of spiritual spaces in the "wilderness" that regard particular animals and plants as emblems of the divine ascribing particular powers to these objects in ceremonial acts of propitiation and other ritual processes enacted by female spiritual officiants representing the Mama Nganga of the Kongo spiritual tradition and the Iyalorisa of the Yoruba belief system. "Remember this: against all that destruction some yet remained among us unforgetful of origins, dreaming secret dreams, seeing secret visions, hearing secret voices ..."