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For far too long academies have offered a rigid model of the literary traveller spanning cultures as either A) a White Westerner who remains solidly within the terms of his or her identity reporting on a foreign culture with maximal intellectual and psychological distance or B) a White Westerner who becomes so transformed under the spell of an alien culture that he or she "goes native" and writes out of that transformed subjectivity.
What academic scholarship has traditionally neglected is that condition experienced by so many poets in the past few decades: a recognition of cultural diversities within the psyche so that the voices, objects, languages and rhythms of several cultures co-exist.1 This means: a writing filled with paradoxes, contradictions, unsolvable problems, a farrago of subjective and objective responses. But how can experiences of many cultures be handled in such a manner that the writing about them doesn't descend into a schizophrenic stew? Or how can such cross-cultural blendings reflect something more than the most superficial surface features of each culture?
The books by the French sociologist Roger Bastide might provide some welcome keys. Bastide is an odd mixture of academic sociologist (long time Sorbonne professor), ethnographer specializing in Afroamerican spiritual cults, historian. He is also a source of inspiration to the archetypal psychologist and poet. Only two of his twenty-eight books are currently available in English: The African Religions of Brazil (Johns Hopkins Press, 1978) and African Civilizations in the New World (C. Hurst Publishers, London, 1974). The place to begin reading Bastide is The African Religions of Brazil. It is a frustratingly confusing book - yet one of the most astonishingly insightful books on Afroamerican cultures in general and cultural interpénétrations in Brazil in particular. What Bastide has attempted is complicated. On the one hand, he is fascinated by how African cultures have survived the Middle Passage. So his eye is constantly focused on the music and dances associated with various Afro-Brazilian spiritual cults centered in Bahia. As a sociologist he wants to puzzle out the role that various social groups have played in preserving or re-interpreting bits of African cultures. But most movingly, he wants to comprehend - and it is at this juncture that his work becomes most relevant to poets...