The Transdisciplinary in Literary Postcoloniality: Sacred Spaces

This special issue, titled “Spaces of the Sacred: Mapping Literary Mysticism”, aims to map literary mysticism and spiritual literature in a transdisciplinary framework. The contributions cover a complex range of themes, from poetry of sacred spaces and shrines to narrative traditions. The common thread uniting these articles is the dynamics of spatialisation of identity in response to the threat of globalisation. In the past, interdisciplinary studies and research on sacred spaces and the concept of literary narrative and textual production seemed to be adjacent and interstitial to the leading disciplines, or blurred under the umbrella term of globalisation. Subsequently, humanist geography interfaced with the topological and the spatial turn, as many scholars who developed their concepts in the 1990s furthered their transdisciplinary analyses. What has not been represented to its full potential, however, is not so much the complex triadic issues related to literature, geography, and religion, but rather the mysticism of sacred spaces and postcolonial textuality in multilingual and multicultural forms of expression negotiating alternative geographies and spatial spiritualities. Literary postcoloniality, in its many forms and genres and as featured in the present contributions, aims to resist cultural homogenisation, (de-)sacralisation, and the dispossession of sacred spaces. The ambition of this issue has been to challenge the fixity of the dual approach of traditional academic disciplines by pairing geography, literature, and religion, and in so doing to broaden the horizon towards a transdisciplinary perspective.

In 1987, William Mallory and Paul Simpson-Housley released Geography and Literature: A Meeting of the Disciplines, which has been endorsed as a unique interdisciplinary effort illustrating that “literary landscapes are rooted in reality and that the geographer’s knowledge can help ground symbolic literary landscape” (Mallory and Simpson-Housley 1987, back cover). Their focus prioritised the “centre” and not the expanding “periphery” of postcolonial literatures. In 1991, Jamie Scott and Paul Simpson-Housley shifted the perspective to sacred spaces with Sacred Places and Profane Spaces: Essays in the Geographics of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

This was followed by their ground-breaking Mapping the Sacred: Religion, Geography and Postcolonial Literatures (2001), which took up a challenging multidisciplinary approach to expand the representation of sacred space and place in postcolonial literatures—from Ireland to the Caribbean, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, and Africa. In this volume Africa is represented by two contributions on Nigeria, one on Kenya, and one on West Africa. In 2011, Scott contributed to the field with an essay titled “Religion and Postcolonial Writing” in the prestigious Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature.

Driven by the momentum of the spatial turn, and benefiting from humanistic geography and literary iconographies, this special issue is a timely contribution to the recognition of diverse and, in some cases, multiple sacred spaces and their geographic and indigenous ontologies. The geographical spaces and territories discussed in the articles feature narrative themes from Nigeria to Australia, from Zimbabwe to Ethiopia, and from Jerusalem to the Himalayas. In many instances, there are worlds within worlds to be discovered, where the soul of the world (Das and Tripathi), regions of tribal and animistic chants and poems (Akingbe; Fincham), and the interstices of urban space (Chetty) splinter into surviving microcosms of resistance against desecration, oblivion, and suppression (Baraldo), and reverence for the spiritual planet Earth is rekindled through relocation to a new place. The latter is found in the Rastafari vision of the New Jerusalem, relocated to Ethiopia (Tomei); the microcosm of the Indian diaspora in urban South Africa (Chetty); the settlement of the colony of lepers in Mashonaland, seen as the new Zion (Masiola); and the centre of Orthodox devotion and monastic seclusion in Abyssinia, narrativised and distorted through imperial eyes (Baraldo).

This approach transgresses the boundaries of ethnological religious space and myths, to give voice to authors who have innovated postcoloniality through identifying mystic space across varieties of English and genre (poetry, plays, travel writing, narration, lyrics and songs, novels). The concept of mysticism and spirituality likewise raises current issues of space and power dynamics, which are also addressed in some of the essays in this selection. A few examples are those featuring Mount Zion in Jerusalem, Amba Gishen in Ethiopia, Mount Chigona in Mashonaland in Zimbabwe, the Himalayas, the Niger Delta, the Australian desert and Uluru, and the ancestral San territories. In these articles the modes of implication and spatial engagement show the diversity of the recognition of space and its possession, and its possible desecration or desacralisation—as well as the instability of sacred space subsequent to appropriation, exclusion, inversion, and hybridisation (see Chidester and Linenthal 1995, 19). To variable degrees and stages, the articles highlight the diachronic and synchronic dimensions of space, together with narrative memory and beliefs. The themes appear to flow along the lines of geo-morphological spaces and their symbolic meanings. Memory, sacralisation, desecration, diaspora, and dispossession are represented at various levels across time and space in complex intra- and intertextuality.

The contribution by Niyi Akingbe explores the poetry of two contemporary Nigerian poets. In his article, titled “Locating the Sacred: ‘Claimed’ and ‘Unclaimed’ Spaces in John P. Clark-Bekederemo’s Remains of a Tide and Harry Garuba’s Animist Chants and Memorials”, Akingbe proposes a distinction between “claimed” and “unclaimed” spaces. He observes that the sacred space of the supernatural manifests in unclaimed space, in opposition to the claimed and public space, which is physical. The selected poems thematise the geo-morphological and metaphysical world of nature and myth as Akingbe makes a distinction between the claimed space and the impenetrability of the unclaimed space, where the sacred “is delineated along imagined and reimagined spaces”. He emphasises the interweaving of the oral tradition in African poetry and the successful transposition of oral poetry techniques into written forms.

The Niger Delta and its waters and creeks, as evoked in the ancestral landscapes discussed by Akingbe, are followed by the bush and deserts of South Africa and Australia, in the contribution by Gail Fincham. Deserts and barren lands are literary topographies in southern African and Australian literature, and this article in part connects with the ancestral memory and spirituality of endangered native nations. Fincham outlines the connections between two travel narratives, Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines and Julia Martin’s A Millimetre of Dust, drawing on the work of the American ecologist Barry Lopez (2019). The common thread individuated by Fincham is invisibility, as the Songlines and the life quests of Aboriginals are invisible to non-Aboriginals, and the San people have vanished from the lands through which Martin travels. Martin must rely on the stories recorded in the Bleek-Lloyd archive, while she also remains conscious of linguistic distance and the risks of interpretation. Fincham draws parallels and lines of convergence between Chatwin’s Aboriginals and Martin’s San based on the cosmological belief in the total inclusion of creatures and elements in the circular flow of becoming, thus thwarting the prescribed vision of order in Western planetary categorising.

The deserts and the caves, the stones and the rocks of these travelogues of Australia and South Africa lead us to the theological and visionary poetry of John Bradburne in Rosanna Masiola’s article. The excerpts included in this contribution are drawn from a staggering corpus of some 160 000 verses and are all inspired by Franciscan cosmology, with water being seen as an essential element of purification and redemption being a symbolic as well as a physical act which Bradburne performed upon the lepers in the colony of Mutemwa at the foot of Mount Chigona in Zimbabwe. It is to this area that Bradburne relocated the Holy Land and Jerusalem through his visions. As with Akingbe’s “unclaimed space”, Bradburne’s contemplative spaces of vision have been transformed into “claimed” sites as black pilgrims from southern Africa and the diasporic communities in the UK and across the Atlantic gather to celebrate this Servant of God through chants and prayers. Spaces of purification and meditation seem to map both Bradburne’s “real” life and his visionary life: from his time as a soldier with the Gurkhas in India to his last recorded visions on Mount Chigona. Bradburne’s topophilia interfaces with his cosmological vision and interweaves with his poetry, from the Lake District to Devon, Lourdes, and Assisi, and eventually to Mashonaland, as biblical symbols and metaphors intertwine with the landscape and Shona spirituality.

All the articles in this issue evolve along a diachronic and diatopic axis where different genres and forms of expression mark different sacred spaces, highlighting a rich trans-textuality. Consequently, shifting from the oral traditions and the poetry of Nigerian authors, accounts of indigeneity in the travelogues of southern African and British writers, and the theological poems of a Catholic missionary among lepers and refugees in Mashonaland, the question of beliefs and religions in a diasporic context of South Africa is thematised in Rajendra Chetty’s article. The article focuses on the Indo-South African diaspora and religious tensions between resistance and reconciliation in the works of Ronnie Govender. Thus, moving away from the “wretched of the earth” confined in the Mutemwa colony, “Sacred Spaces and Contested Identities in Ronnie Govender’s ‘Beyond Calvary’” is about the marginalised Indian communities of South Africa. In opposition to Bradburne’s theology of love, the Protestant missionaries left an indelible mark of suffering due to the forced abjuration of people’s cultural and religious traditions, such as when the missionaries forced people to throw into the water the little statues of divinities who protected households. The article sheds light on Govender’s work as a playwright in South Africa during apartheid and the activity of the Protestant missionaries in converting South African Indians. As most of the authors analysed here, Govender has passed away, but Chetty had the privilege of working in close contact with him. Indian spirituality and mysticism reflects the vibrant microcosm of the Indian community and its rich linguistic and spiritual heritage. The Christianisation of Indians in South Africa emerges in verbal interactions during the performance of the plays on stage; moreover, Chetty juxtaposes other conflictual perspectives from voices coming from the margins, such as Omar Badsha’s resistance photography and Agnes Sam’s short story “Jesus is Indian”. In doing so, Chetty foregrounds the malaise felt by Catholic Indians in South Africa.

If in the marginalised urban space of Chetty’s article Hindu spirituality is stigmatised and cornered into darkness, the article by Chhandita Das and Priyanka Tripathi features the full glory and omnipotence of the Himalayas. In “Exploring Eco-Mysticism in Between Heaven and Earth: Writings on the Indian Hills”, they draw from the essays collected by the prolific Anglo-Punjabi writer and novelist Ruskin Bond and Bulbul Sharma. Their focus creates a triadic dimension of ecology, mysticism, and space, in which the hills of northern India are at the heart of the narrativisation employed by three contemporary Anglo-Indian authors (or, authors writing in English), namely Alka Pande in “The Two Devis of Nainital”, Keki Daruwalla in “A Drive from Himachal to Kashmir”, and Madhu Tandan in “A Silent Winter”. Whether in the form of travelogues, diaries, or accounts, these texts are set across North Indian hill stations, like Nainital, Macleodganj, Srinagar, and Sattal, in the Himalayan and sub-Himalayan ranges. The authors focus on the call for preservation as opposed to destruction, in geographical, cultural, and spiritual terms. Das and Tripathi are inspired by the overall aim of Bond and Sharma’s selection, as “sacred transcendence inspires a practical commitment in the human world though an alternative vision to review and renew the ethical imperatives of nature to preserve the environment of the Himalayan ranges”.

The article which follows also deals with sacred mountains; however, in this case, the central focus is not so much environmental as it is the dynamics of the sacralisation and desacralisation of an Ethiopian mountain, Amba Gishen. In “Mapping Ethiopia’s Ancient Spirituality and Amba Gishen: From Sacralisation to Desacralisation”, Matteo Baraldo considers the sacramental space of the mountain and the diachronic shift in beliefs related to the mountain and its functions in the Western narrativisation of The History of Prince Rasselas by Samuel Johnson. The shifting literary topographies offer an emblematic example through Mount Amhara—or the Mount of Myrrh—also called the Mountain of the Royal Family and the Mount of the finding of the relic of the Holy Cross. Over time this mountain became one of the holiest shrines in a territory where churches and monasteries abound. However, the representation of the mountain in European accounts manipulated and distorted the image of this sacred space. This imagined and reimagined paradise bore no relation to the deep and ancient Ethiopian spirituality and its localisation of sacred spaces, as sacred spaces are not animistic entities but derive their power from the presence of early Christian relics, such as tombs, fragments of the Cross, and the Ark of the Covenant and the Tablets of the Law, in various forms of Solomonic derivation. Conflictual issues of faith, beliefs, and tradition clash with Western romanticisation and imagery in travel accounts and literature. Here again, sacred spaces are manipulated and distorted, albeit in beautiful poetical language, and through mistakes in transcription.

Renato Tomei further explores the conceptual and theological dimension of Ethiopian space in “Relocating a Sacred Space: From Mount Zion to the New Jerusalem in the Mystic Poetry of Rastafari”. In approaching the discourse on the conceptualisation of sacred spaces, the article focuses on the relocation of the New Jerusalem or Zion to Ethiopia, and thus brings about a circularity appropriate for this special issue in light of the “Back to Africa” movement. As with the preceding articles, Tomei’s contribution compresses what would otherwise be a more exhaustive approach to explore the contested sacred space of Zion and Jerusalem in geographical, historical, and metaphysical textuality. Whereas the previous articles centred on complex layers of travel narratives, dramas, and poems, this concluding contribution focuses on songs, more specifically those written and performed by the Rastafari. The latter are members of a spiritual movement that originated in Jamaica; along with the wave of Garveyism and the “Back to Africa” movement, they have relocated the place they refer to as Zion to Ethiopia. In line with the topic of the article by Baraldo, Tomei centres his argument on the relocation of Jerusalem to Ethiopia as performed by the Rastafari. In this article he outlines themes which have inspired a complex range of emotional and celebratory literature, based on Biblical scriptures, prayers, and chants, stories of conquest and destruction, pilgrimage, and diasporic narratives.