A Poetics of Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: God, Human-Nature Relationship, and Negritude

The Poetics of Postcolonial Biblical Criticism

God, Human-Nature Relationship, and Negritude

Aliou Cissé Niang

THE POETICS OF POSTCOLONIAL BIBLICAL CRITICISM

God, Human-Nature Relationship, and Negritude

Copyright ©

2019

Aliou Cissé Niang. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

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paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-1729-4

hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-4193-9

ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-4192-2

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Names: Niang, Aliou Cissé, author.

Title: The poetics of postcolonial biblical criticism : God, human-nature relationship, and negritude / Aliou Cissé Niang.

Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books,

2019

. | Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Identifiers: ISBN:

978-1-5326-1729-4 (

paperback

). | ISBN: 978-1-4982-4193-9 (

hardcover

). | ISBN: 978-1-4982-4192-2 (

ebook

).

Subjects: LCSH: Bible—Postcolonial criticism.

Classification: BS

476

N

53

2019

(print). | BS

476

(epub).

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

March 26, 2020

Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright ©1989 National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Figures and Tables

Preface

Abbreviations

1. Introduction

2. Human-Nature Relationship in Diola Contexts

3. The Divine–Human–Nature Relationship in Israel and Her Neighbors

4. Nonhuman-Human Relationship in the New Testament

5. Empire in Senegal West Africa

6. Conclusion

Bibliography

I am dedicating this book to

My Late Grandfather Abdoulaye Manga

My Late Grandmother Fayinséni Dièmé (Kamout Bassène)

My Late Mother Lucie Bassène

My Late Ante Kakaine Manga

My Step Father Édouard Diatta

My Ante Sini Bassène

My Ante Fatou Bassène (Jishēbo)

My Wife Elizabeth Renée Niang

My Son Micah Aliou Martin Niang

Figures and Tables

Figure

1

: Map of Diola pattern of migration and settlements

Figure

2

: A detailed map of the area called Diola country

Figure

3

: Diola migration of the three groups from Burofay to Mof Avvi

Figure

4

: The Mof Avvi townships and land divisions

Figure

5

: The Gajandu

Figure

6

: Drawing of a Faidherbia or Acacia Albida tree

Figure

7

: Diola farmers overturning dead grass into dikes

Figure

8

: Diagram of the meticulous irrigation system

Figure

9

: The layout of the Garden Room of Livia

Figure

10

: The walls of the Garden Room of Livia

Figure

11

: Tellus, the Goddess of the Earth, part of the Augustan Altar of Peace

Figure

12

: The Augustan Cuirass, also known as the Prima Porta

Figure

13

: The India and Colonial Exhibition

1886

Map of the World

Figure

14

: The Imperial Federation Map showing the British Empire in

1886

F

igure

15

: France and the Five Continents by Pierre Henri Ducos de la Haille

Table

1

: Nutrients from the Acacia Albida tree

Preface

M

y grandparents grew up

in Enampor and Séléki—Senegalese West African townships of Brin-Séléki and especially the Bandial Diola townships known as Mof Avvi Royal Land.¹ Diola people of Mof Avvi were rice farmers. They cultivated their rice fields to feed their families, perform rituals, and barter. French colonial influences affected but failed to wipeout much of these Diola traditional practices. Their persistence and now gradual resurgence in post-colonial era debunk much of the conclusions reached by many sociologists and anthropologists who predicted the demise of most African tradition and religious practices influenced by foreign cultures (Western cultures) and religions (Islam and Christianity).² Much of their research was informed by the strictures of the British social anthropological method of the day that jettisoned local witness accounts to focus on the so-called objective observations deemed more reliable.³

My Diola grandparents were rice farmers. Land, for them, was life and rain life-giving under the aegis of the deity they revered, Ala Emit God. They learned to understand the language of nature, weather patterns, and performed appropriate rituals they deemed necessary to maintain their side of the covenant with their deity. The word means visible beings,⁴ a name, I argue, reflects a Diola self-definition that is fully cognizant about their role as creatures among many visible and invisible beings, namely nonhuman creatures that populate the cosmos God created. This belief awareness anchors Diola sense of egalitarian-individualism and role in God’s creation.

I recall my grandparents reflecting on and wondering why rain was becoming rarer and dry seasons longer than ever. Many of them and their priests thought what was going on with the climate was not just a natural cyclical phenomenon but was probably due to some human causes. As often was the case in the Diola world, elders and priests suspected a broken relationship between God, humans, and other creatures. In other words, humans have failed to actualize their end of the covenant between God and the deity’s creature. The transatlantic slave trade and colonial occupation were often cited as being destabilizing events that did much to alter the moral structure of Diola culture. As Robert M. Baum observes, when faced with the suppressive nature of the French colonization and version of Europeanized Christianity introduced by some of the Holy Ghost Fathers missionaries, Diola priests and elders began to question the powers of their shrines in light of what they perceived to have been a massive failure of their shrines to defeat the alienating powers of French colonialism.⁵

I have lived in America since December 1990 and have been amazed at what I learned over the years. As rainfalls are flooding many parts of the world, as Artic icebergs are disappearing, as seawaters are gradually rising making the reality of global warming hard to deny and an impending irreversible environmental disaster hard to avert, many Western experts began to relexify. As far as I know Africa is statistically the least emitter of carbon compared to western industrial countries to date. It is often the case that nature is valued in so far as she benefits humans as commodity rather than a subject on her own right. As Greg Garrard says, Nature is only valued in terms of its usefulness to us. Many environmentalists argue that we need to develop a value system which takes the intrinsic or inherent value of nature as its starting point.⁶

This book offers a humble reading of Scripture in conversation with Diola Faith Traditions.

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my dear faculty colleagues and administrators at Union, beginning with President Dr. Serene Jones, Dean Dr. Mary Boys, Vice President Fred Davie, Drs. James H. Cone, Brigitte Kahl, John McGuckin, Janet Walton, Tara (Hyun Kyung Chung), Daisy Machado, Pamela Cooper-White, Claudio Carvalhaes, John Thatamanil, Euan Cameron, and Gary Dorrien, Sam Cruz, and Troy Messenger. I extend my deepest gratitude to Dr. Barbara King Lord whose close reading of the manuscript was invaluable to its completion. The Director of the Union Center of Earth Ethics, Karenna Gore encouraged me as I was working on the project and found it insightful.

This work would not have been completed if it were not for the unfailing support of my wife, Elizabeth Renée Niang, and son, Micah Aliou Martin Niang. I wish my grandparents were alive today so I can read this book to them. I am sure they are watching my family and me, hearing the content of this book every time I am speaking about and teaching on Diola life and thought, and especially the wisdom they imparted to me.

1

. Berghen and Manga, Une introduction. Berghen and Manga take a much closer look at the framing practices of the Diola of Enampor as well as a concise sociohistorical, religious, political, and economic context. Palmeri, Living with the Diola. Bassène, Morphosyntaxe, 3-6, builds on Palmeri’s account on the history, life, religion and sociolinguistic setting of the Diola of Mof Avvi. Berghen and Manga predate Palmeri’s volume but both works share much in common.

2

. Horton, African Conversion, 85-108; idem, On the Rationality of Conversion Part II, 373-399; Humphrey, Conversion Reconsidered, 27-40. I will also cite the French anthropologist, Louis-Vincent Thomas, Les Diola, 73, who reached similar conclusions.

3

. Vansian, Being Colonized, 5, spoke of how the British model of inquiry was not always followed by some social anthropologists. He certainly parted ways with it seeing the lived experiences of local people have actionable evidence an outsider cannot possibly access.

4

. Thomas, Les Diola, 73.

5

. Baum, Emergence.

6

. Garrard, Ecocriticism, 21.

Abbreviations

b.: Babylonian Talmud (Babli)

BDAG: Bauer, Walter, Frederick W. Danker, W. F. Arndt, and F. W. Gingrich, Greek–English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

2001

EDNT: Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament.

3

vols. Edited by Horst Balz and Gerhard Schneider. Translated by James W. Thompson and John W. Medendorp. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,

1991–93

HALOT: Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament.

4

 vols. Ludwig Koehler, Walter Baumgartner, and J. J. Stamm. Translated and edited under the supervision of M. E. J. Richardson. Leiden: Brill,

1994–1999

KJV:

King James Version (Authorized Version)

LCL: Loeb Classical Library

LEH: Lust, Johann, Erik Eynikel, and Katrin Hauspie, eds. Greek–English Lexicon of the Septuagint. Rev. ed. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft,

2003

LSJM: Liddell, H. G., R. Scott, H. S. Jones, R. McKenzie, A Greek-English Lexicon.

9

th ed. with revised supplement. Oxford: Clarendon,

1996

LXX: Septuagint

m.: Mishnah

MT: Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible

NAS: New American Standard Version of the Bible

NETS: A New English Translation of the Septuagint. Edited by Albert Pietersma and Benjamin G. Wright. Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2007

NIV: New International Version of the Bible

NJB: New Jerusalem Bible

NRSV: New Revised Standard Version of the Bible

OCD: Oxford Classical Dictionary.

4

th ed. Edited by Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth. Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2012

OGIS: Orientis graeci inscriptiones selectae.

2

vols. Edited by Wilhelm Dittenberger. Leipzig: Hirzel,

1903–1905

SBEC: Studies in the Bible and Early Christianity

Tanak: Jewish Publication Society translation

TDNT: Theological Dictionary of the New Testament.

10

vols. Edited by Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich. Translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,

1964–1976

1

Introduction

The Negro is the person of Nature who traditionally lives of and with the soil, in and by the cosmos. —Léopold Sédar Senghor

¹

Most important, perhaps, is the relationship between people and nature, or how people view nature and relate to it so as to ensure their survival. The Diola feel that they are part of a totality in which they, the objects around them, the things that happen, and nature itself are elements within a single and all encompassing context. This is why the elements needed for survival, like the land and its products, the forests and animals, are not considered to be available to anyone who happens to be the first to take possession of them. Nature is not seen as an object to be exploited, but rather as a subject that meets people on equal terms. —Paolo Palmeri

²

The Poetics of Postcolonial Biblical Criticism is a project that has germinated in the most profound sense from my roots as a son of the Diola people of Senegal, West Africa, especially the dwellers of the village of Mof Avvi,

³

now as a biblical scholar living in the global arena that is New York City, a professor at a racially and ethnically diverse theological seminary.

Figure 1

Map of Diola pattern of migration and settlements on the northern and southwest banks of the Casamance River known as le Pays Diola Diola country. As a region of Sénégal, West Africa, the Casamance is the most fertile of all the regions of the country; and as a result; it is the breadbasket of the country. The Casamance River irrigates Diola rice fields and is the fishery for most Diola communities. Demographically, the region of Sénégal called the Casamance is densely settled by Diola people who number about

90

% of the population in the region and

3

.

7

% nationally. The Diola refer to this area as the Diola country. Adapted from Niang’s Faith and Freedom in Galatia and Senegal,

71

.

Figure 2

A detailed map of the area called Diola country showing all the main townships. Some Diola people migrated to the eastern part of the region—that is east of the city of Ziguinchor. My grandparents later moved from Mof Avvi to the village Adéane. The map is taken from Thomas, Les Diola.

.

My academic journey in America has always been an existential endeavor to find ways to read the Bible through my cultural lens in conversation with others, because I believe that faith in divine revelation, as I have come to understand it, resists any assured attempt to be its guardian. Divine revelation includes a human interpretative voice filtered through its cultural milieu. Part of the impetus for this book has been my wondering if there is insight to be gained by reengaging general revelation at all. If there is something worth pursuing in that regard, then my Diola ancestors may have something to teach me and other followers of Jesus about divine, human, and nature relationships. As far as I can tell, my ancestors never debated the existence of God; neither did they think of the deity as remote, unconcerned about human affairs, or annoyed by the daily cacophonies made by the deity’s creatures. My Diola ancestors believed that humans must strive to hear, apprehend, interpret, and exercise God’s pervasive speech that creation manifests.

God created the world is a statement often taken for granted by many children of Abraham in the faith. Some followers of Jesus Christ interpret the expression, God so loved the world, found in John

3

:

16

to mean God loves only humans—a reading that sadly fails to take into account the meaning of the word κόσμος creation, universe (LSJM).

⁴

The Bible records millennia-old dynamic myths recounted in Ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman contexts that tell why the world was made by God and why the deity is related to her in many ways. The two creation stories told in the First Testament offer two different and yet balanced accounts. The first account depicts God as creator—making, shaping, and relating to creation through an empowering speech (Gen

1

:

1

–

3

,

10

–

12

,

26

–

28, NRSV

).

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, Let there be light; and there was light . . . God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it. And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good . . . Then God said, Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.

In contrast, the second emphasizes the deity’s actions in anthropomorphic terms. God shapes dust of the ground and breathed into it the breath of life and transformed it into a living being (Gen

2

:

7

)—a direct inspiriting

⁵

of the breath of life empowering the earth-creature to breathe, that is enlivening this being as physical addressable spiritual being.

⁶

. . . the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being. And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. (Gen

2

:

7

–

8, NRSV

)

Whether humans were created last and placed in a life-suited living space (Gen

1

:

1

–

28

) or first in a desert-like milieu and then made to dwell in the divinely tended garden (Gen

2

:

7

–

8

), it is a balanced creative act. God is the source of all forms of life created through effective words and deeds—gathering and speaking nonhuman existing matter to create the universe and everything in it. The creator God farms (Gen

2

:

8

–

9

) and instructs humans to do likewise (Gen

2

:

15

). As scripture has it, creation, humans and the land belong to the creator-deity (Exod

13

:

2

;

19

:

5

;

25

:

23

;

34

:

19

; Ezek

29

:

9

) and Israel is a tenant (Lev.

25

:

12

). God sends rains upon the land to ensure Israel has enough food to go around (Deut

11

:

10

–

21

;

15

:

1

–

11

).

In my native country, Senegalese Diola myths of my grandparents’ faith traditions recount a universe made by an uncreated God called Ala Émit,

⁷

who is intimately involved in creation. The deity sustains creation with rain that moistens the soil to yield abundant crops, especially rice. To Diola people, rice is not just any crop, it is a sacred produce.

⁸

Most Diola beliefs about the role of their supreme deity in human affairs are shared by many Africans, a reality that has led some African scholars, including me, to use the umbrella nomenclature African Traditional Religion instead of African Traditional Religions.

⁹

Strikingly, in both biblical and Diola faith traditions, the Earth, humans, flora, and fauna are empowered by the deity to reproduce and become participatory agents in the creative process. Seen this way, the universe, humans, earth, fauna, and flora are not objects at the mercy of human control and whimsical manipulations, but subjects. Responding to increasing contemporary climate change pressures, many biblical scholars and theologians are now scrambling for effective theological answers trying assiduously to recover descriptively or systematically.

¹⁰

In a brief but invaluable encounter with a famous theologian who joined the postcolonial conversation, I made the cardinal mistake of revealing that I read Scripture through a postcolonial lens. By cardinal mistake I mean that I went against what my experience taught me—that many Western scholars believe they are the sole guardians of truth, knowledge, and methodology, and surely nothing scholarly can come from black Africa, much less a postcolonial contribution to biblical studies. I was then reminded by this theologian that postcolonial theory was born in India and not Africa. I was not that surprised.

As a Diola native, I argue that the Négritude articulated by Léopold Sédar Senghor, especially its aspect that deals with the divine–human–nature relationship, echoes many of the religious concepts that direct Diola agricultural practices, especially rice farming. This heuristic postcolonial repositioning lens, I argue, emphasizes a biblical divine–human–nature relationship—a dimension of Senghorian Négritude he expounded upon in his speech delivered in

1956

at the First International Conference of Negro Writers and Artists in Paris and published in Présence Africaine. The speech clearly highlights his reverence for nature and anchors his overall perspective on the divine-human-nature relationship—a reality he wanted colonizers, colonized, and diaspora people of African descent to know. In this speech Senghor firmly stated that the Negro is a person of nature who traditionally lives of and with the soil, in and by the cosmos.

¹¹

My questions, then, are how does this Senghorian conviction relate to Diola belief in the divine–human–nature relationship? What do Scripture and non-Christian Diola faith traditions say about human relationship to nature? Is there something in these traditions worth learning in order for humans to live symbiotically with nature and address our current climate change concerns?

Senghor believes floral and faunal life of the environment that permeates continental Africa and its climate—both warm and humid—heightens and directs Africans’ unmediated sensory relationship to nature.

¹²

The resulting symbiotic relationship makes taming nature, as colonial agronomists did by hastily introducing European agricultural methods during the colonial period in tropical Africa, a serious mistake

¹³

because not only did God empower humans to understand all creatures, Senghor insists that humans are with animals, plants, minerals, all the phenomena of nature and that we can know other creatures at the intersectionality of our shared existence and movement.

¹⁴

The universe, to Senghor, includes both individual and distinct but interdependent forces among which humans are placed in a tight network of binding and sustaining a vertical and horizontal solidarity with nature. In other words, all the universe, visible and invisible from God to a grain of sand, through the spirits, ancestors, animals, plants, minerals, is composed of ‘communicating vessels’ of the solidarity of vital forces that emanate all from God.

¹⁵

Senghor’s understanding of the divine–human–nature relationship, I argue, is akin to the Diola conception of the universe. The fact that Senghor was a devout Christian who read Scripture with his African context in mind made his Négritude a repositioning trope insightful for articulating a symbiotic ecotheology. In fact, studies by anthropologists and ethnographers such as Louis-Vincent Thomas, Robert Baum, Paolo Palmeri, Constant Vanden Berghen, and Adrien Manga

¹⁶

on Diola religion echo many of Senghor’s ideas. Ritualization of rice farming makes most Diola people spiritual farmers whose heightened sensibility to nature is meticulously negotiated throughout the year because, to the Diola, human life finds its best expression through its ritualized participation in the divine–human–nature relational ecosystem in which all creatures, human and nonhuman, relate mutually.

Though often missed by many of his critics, Senghor contextualized Scripture, especially biblical myths of creation (Gen

1

:

1

—

2

:

25

; John

1

:

1

–

18

; Rev

22

:

1

–

3

) in many of his poems. My use of Senghorian Négritude as a method to reposition Diola farming practices displaced by French colonial occupation to re-embrace some of their farming practices sensitive to nature calls for a reading of biblical passages such as Gen

1

–

2

; Lev

25

:

1

–

7

; Deut

11

:

10

–

12

;

15

:

1

–

11

; Rom

8

:

19

–

23

; Mark

4

:

26

–

29

; Matt

13

:

24

–

30

; John

1

:

1

–

18

; and Rev

22

:

1

–

5

. The linguistic, historical, and cultural distance between biblical and Diola faith traditions calls for a careful comparative study. Diola people are not the only ones who revere nature. Nisbert Taisekwa Taringa casts his Shona farming practices in a negative light insisting that they are based on fear and superstition rather than reverence to God, but remains committed to a Christian–Shona Dialogue.

¹⁷

His stance in emphasizing fear on the Shona side was clearly precipitated by much of the counterarguments for some legitimation of Shona religious practices in African spaces contested by colonial officials, missionary Christianity, and proponents of Shona Faith Traditions.

¹⁸

Diola people were labeled uncivilized pagans by French colonial officials because of their opposition to any form of centralized government imposed on them and determination to preserve their sociocultural, political, economic, and especially their traditional religious convictions. In Senghorian Négritude, the African lives in symbiosis with nature—a reality most Diola people exercise. Seen from this perspective, Christians can learn much from both scripture and Diola reverent negotiations of life with nature in order to cultivate a healthy relationship with God’s earth and creation and perhaps avoid irreversible ecological disaster. The truth is that centuries of reception of the Bible have somewhat failed to give due attention to the agency of other creatures, especially nature. My question is: might there be other sources from which a concerned exegete can learn?

I argue that we can learn from Diola people of Senegal, West Africa, who practiced African Traditional Religion and Native Americans, just to list a few. These are people who have been negotiating life with nature since time immemorial and were aware of climate change since its onset. I understand how daunting a task it is to explore Scripture in conversation with non-textual faith traditions like Diola religion. It is risky to