ABSTRACT
‘African’ spirituality is configured as a way of healing or transcending trauma, chiefly as a kind of intergenerational, interspatial communication which is unavailable to ‘official’ spheres of discourse: it enacts Paul Gilroy’s ‘politics of transfiguration’ in that it obscures as it enhances, says without showing. Critics have also focused on Erna Brodber’s stylistic strategy, which expands notions of the very aesthetics of a narrative of spiritual healing. Walker-Johnson reads Myal as a ‘rhetorical structure which comments on its literary antecedents;’ Brodber’s disruptive aesthetic is a strategy for conveying the social, historical and spiritual disruption of the colonial text itself, and if spirit theft is literary, so is its healing. In Myal, Brodber uses Obeah to not only challenge the ‘facts’ of History but the very making of these facts –historiography itself. Brodber’s wariness of absolute labels also recalls Obeah and Myal’s origins in imperial discourse, of which her narrative is mistrustful–indeed which it directly attacks.
