Envisioning Black Feminist Voodoo Aesthetics by Martin Kameelah L

Author:Martin, Kameelah L.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2012-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Folk Healing vs. Western Hierarchy

The conflict between folk healing and western scientific medicine is one that continually arises where African ways of knowing are present. Miranda “Mama” Day has a complicated, but working relationship with Dr. Brian Smithfield in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day. Nellie McPherson outright refuses to feed her baby any of Nurse Bloom’s “old fashioned potion shit” in Baby of the Family (149). In Another Good Loving Blues, Melvira Dupree surrenders a deathly ill child to Dr. Flowers knowing that she does not have the ability to retrieve souls from the grave and Rannie stubbornly rejects Aunt Sarah’s “swamp magic” in blind faith that a white doctor will come out in the rain to care for a colored baby in Alice Walker’s short story “Strong Horse Tea.” As Valerie Lee observes in Granny Midwives and Black Women Writers (1996), the history of African American healing women is inextricably connected to the development of the male-dominated medical profession. The rise of the American Medical Association (AMA) is largely responsible for moving black women’s healing practices “from folklore to forceps, from asafetida to anesthesia, from home to hospital, from license from God to licensing by the State”(23). A cultural and professional war was waged against folk healers with the rise of western scientific medicine, which eventually discredited and displaced even those who resisted. Once the revered seat of ancient wisdom and healing, African ritual specialists regrettably “lost their high cultural status, their bodies becoming the terrain where a history of desire and defiance was fought” (24).

This was a battle not easily won by the medical profession as conjurers, mambos, and midwives formed a culture of resistance. Conjuring practices moved underground while many midwives fought back by assimilating to the standards, but adding their own professional touch through the contraband hidden away in their midwives’ bags.[12] Items such as castor oil, ginger tea, and other herbs and products of nature often found in the bags were “not in accordance with the new medicalization of birth [and healing], but carry-overs from their practice of folk medicine” (44). Where Lee argues that “it has been left to African American women novelists to preserve the language, lore, and learning of [women healers],” I extend her idea to encompass the moving image as well (24). Both Kasi Lemmons and Julie Dash do an excellent job of preserving the lore and language of female conjure and hoodoo practices in their respective films. Lemmons’s film more specifically engages the ongoing discourse surrounding African American syncretized healing and the near unchallenged sovereignty of western medicine.

Eve’s Bayou not only contrasts folk medicine with that prescribed by the AMA, but also sets up an even more nuanced hierarchy between two of the three priestess figures in the film. The Batiste family lays claim to two adult healers; Louis Batiste is the prominent physician of the town while his sister, Mozelle, is a healer of the soul rather than the body. It is no coincidence that the male is associated with western science and logic.

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