Conde's Trials of the Spirit

In his second edition of the Essay Human on Understanding (1694), John Locke added a section on personal identity that caused numerous theological disputes. In what, Locke asked, lies that self that makes a human a person? He concluded that sameness of person is indifferent to sameness of body. It did not matter, he argued, what the frontispiece was, the shape or structure, for person is a forensic term, and its continuity over time lies in consciousness. Edward Stillingfleet, then Bishop of Worcester, wrote a series of letters condemning Locke's doctrine regarding personality and personal identity, since he argued, it was inconsistent with the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body. "My idea of personal identity," Locke replied, "makes the same body not to be necessary to making the same person, either here or after death; and even in this life the particles of the bodies of the same persons change every moment, and there is no such identity in the body as in the person." Can matter think? If God can add thought to persons, then He can also "super-add" the thinking principle to inert matter. What I would call Locke's thought is a limb argument, his obsession with considering that consciousness could as easily be in our little finger as in our mind, helps us to test the connection between the set of practices in the Caribbean associated with the sacred, literal, and metaphorical and what we might call the uses of ritual--not exactly the underside of the sacred, but its haunting. How did rituals of belief redefine matter and spirit, persons and property in the Americas? Locke describes the "self" as "that conscious thinking thing, whether substance made up of (whether spiritual or material, simple or compounded, it matters not)." And here's his example. If you allow a piece of body, the little finger, for example, to depart from the whole, carrying consciousness with it, "it is evident the little finger would be the person; and self then would have nothing to do with the rest of the body." What kind of metamorphoses would this supposition inspire in the Colonies? If a piece of body could carry mind along with it, then we are dealing with a world in which the meaning of mind and matter, once rendered in codes of law, would be reconfigured as the logic of punishment. The stories that Conde tells are tied up with such a haunting: "whether spiritual or material ... it matters not." The vestigial remnants of bodies return to confound the legal categories of persons and property. Her refutation of transcendence, her emphasis on the materiality that attaches itself to spirit as well as to body, ordains in the least expected of places the convertibility of the heavenly and the earthly domain. The legal idiom of possession, especially in the case of human chattels that could be passed around, damaged, or consumed encouraged novel transactions between physical organisms and animated spirits. This marking of perishables, consumed by use, says something unique about the sober intelligence of ritual. What does the obsession with matter, the disavowal of innate ideas--in contrast with the Cartesian doctrine that the soul always thinks--have, you might ask, to do with Conde's work? What would belief be like if it were as absolute, as real as a fist to the stomach? If it were as natural, as concretely held as the sense of touch? What, then, are the exigencies of spiritual work? Doesn't "spirit" itself have to be redefined, or rather held in suspension as St. Paul exacts in 2 Corinthians: "I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven--whether in the body or out of the body I do not know." It seems to me that the study of Caribbean literature has been blunted by a too-general approach to the nature of divinity, religious sentiment, and embodiment. How are we to delimit the difference between body and spirit? What is the nature of what--in Haitian ritual, especially--came to be nothing less than a militant consecration? …