praying to the east & politics of avoidance [a brief comment]
Of note are the following passages of Cornelia Bailey, a woman born and raised on Sapelo Island who cherishes the traditions there:
If you had been standing on the white sands of this island at dayclean in 1803, or a little later, you might have seen a tall, dark-skinned man with narrow features, his head covered with a cap resembling a Turkish fez, unfold his prayer mat, kneel and pray to the east while the sun rose. This was Bilali, the most famous and powerful of all the Africans who lived on this island during slavery days, and the first of my ancestors I can name.[1]
When I’d go to say my nightly prayer, I’d better not, I repeat, I’d better not let Mama catch me with my head turned to the West. I was up for a good fussing at if she did. […] The first thing I learned when it came to directions was Eat and West. Forget the South and the North. I knew at an early age that the sun rose in the East, so it was easy to pinpoint, and I knew the West, because the sun sets there and the darkness begins. So I knew my directions and who I was supposed to be praying to and who I was supposed to be avoiding. It was god resides in the East. Pray to God, not the devil.[2]
Directionality matters and it carries the material trace of the purposiveness of movement toward social ecstasy. We might say that the posture of prayer is directional and has particular force when engaged with a social choreography. And the politics of avoidance is enacted at the level of this social choreography that is nothing other than a reservoir of memory and dissent. We might even consider that the posture towards the east, in prayer and praise, in the New World after the fact of Middle Passage becomes a moment to acknowledge ancestry of stolen love, life. The western world, the direction towards which they were brought and newly inhabited, was animated by the philosophy of aversion for the objects, for the things, for the persons found in the East.
Thus, directionality serves as memorial. As the first of her ancestors that she can name, Bailey utters Bilali and his posture towards the east as an important fact of memory. That memory is a fact of the materiality of the body; memory is embodied and is prompted at each performance of the turn to the east. The politics of avoidance is also prompted by way of directionality. Bailey states that from a young age, she knew that the direction of her prayer was a pointing toward a who in either direction, and that she had to, with each performance, avoid the devil, the demon, the daemon. What when the devil is the averted gaze? What when the averted gaze leaves unbothered the thing so averted? And how does the politics of avoidance turn as the instantiation of the bridge, that ontological rupture as resistance against any occasion of aversion?
Sapelo is the ground upon which the convergence of influence occurs and if the reverberations of Bilali are felt through directionality, what of dance? Is there a relationship between the circumambulation around the Kaaba and the Ring Shout that Bilali and his descendants index? The relationship might just be borne out on another excess, another accouterment, another throw-away material trace: the Turkish fez.
[1] Cornelia Bailey and Christena Bledsoe, God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man : a Saltwater Geechee Talks About Life on Sapelo Island, 1st edn (New York: Doubleday,, 2000), p. 1.
[2] Bailey and Bledsoe, p. 157.
